Doug Sadownick's Response to Karen O. (Section 2)

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Part II: The Karen Ocamb Situation

First, the Article

Despite the fact that Karen Ocamb had seemed friendly when she saw me at the aforementioned One Archives demonstration protesting Don and Mark’s “take” on the Faeries which she was attending (I waved gaily—“Hi, Karen!”), if the negatively slanted tone of her consequent Feb. 24 Frontiers in L.A. article about the protest is any indication, she was certainly not the least bit impressed by the protestors’ cheeky chants, such as “Faeries cannot harmonize, distorting truth and spreading lies,” or by the parodistic posters we were carrying, one of which equated Mark and Don with Barbara Bush and Dick Cheney, respectively.

Indeed, her article seems quite biased against the demonstration and me in particular, starting with its blunt title, “Radical Faeries Talk Marred by Protests,” and going on to single out, of all the 15-30 folks total who protested at any one point, only my name, and indeed, it was the very first time Karen has ever called me “Dr. Doug Sadownick of the LGBT specialization in clinical psychology at Antioch University in Los Angeles.” To make matters more intense for me, there was a reference after the article to her personal blogsite entry about the incident, “Who’s History? My Curious Encounter with the Radical Faeries,” (http://www.bilerico.com/ 2009/02/whos_history_my_ curious_encounter_with_t.php), which contained outrageous attacks against me and some friends in the context of her frank confession that she had been secretly nursing a big private grudge against me for over 15 years.

I want to spend the bulk of this part of my blog statement addressing hers, but I can’t help but first say a few words about her “objective” journalism in the Frontiers piece, the only publically-appearing description of the protest event that I am aware of. In it, she leaves out any mention of the goodly educational aspect to the lively action we were undertaking, and then gives additional indications of a prejudice against the gay-centered ideas involved by consistently focusing animosity on the people demonstrating. She uses selective words to suggest, in line with the attitude of those being protested against, that the objectors were merely trying to provoke a petulant and petty argument about who deserves to have bragging rights over founding the Radical Faerie movement by unreasonably complaining that Don and Mark were simply “erasing” Mitch, a trivialistic charge she easily then refutes by citing Don in the hall mentioning Mitch in his account. She ends by saying that some protestors who were inside then persistently “angrily shouted at Kilhefner,” another darkening mischaracterization which, it seems to me, allusively casts more aspersion on the demonstration versus conjuring some modicum of objective comprehension about it (instead implicitly eliciting sympathy only for badly put-upon Don and Mark).

Most interestingly, she supports the distorted history involved in the situation. She writes:

Inside, Kilhefner talked about how Walker and Harry Hay discussed the idea for what became the Radical Faeries—a gathering where gay men could talk and discover their authentic gay identities in an idyllic setting. But after a blow up with Hay, Walker left the organizing meeting, and Hay and Kilhefner completed and carried out plans for what became a worldwide movement.

But we know from our previous exploration in Part I of this statement that the above reported account by Don is a deceitful distortion. No such Mitch “blow up” resignation prematurely ended his participation, and he was quite involved with the rest until Don joined with him in the Faerie schism of 1981 to create Treeroots. Karen makes it seem as if Mitch was a big baby. She makes a lot of things seem like something else. She makes the Faeries seem “idyllic,” when, as we know from Don’s letters to Mitch, they were not.

Of all the protestors who were present at Don and Mark’s presentation, it was decided by Karen to name only me: “About 15 protesters, including therapist Dr. Doug Sadownick of the LGBT specialization in clinical psychology at Antioch University in Los Angeles, held signs outside the ONE parking lot blasting Kilhefner.” My guess is that she fingered me because, on the surface, I am the most publically-notable person who attended the demonstration, what with my position at the university and my history as a gay community journalist, author and co-founder of Highways Performance venue, but underneath perhaps Karen was maliciously trying with her selective maneuver to cause me to lose my academic job through the promotion of disparaging notoriety, a not so unlikely possibility when one considers the bile Karen confesses to in her blog statement, and if such a nasty maneuver was indeed being attempted, it would then provide a good example of Jungian Erich Neumann’s notion of the sadistically retaliatory, scapegoating manner in which the totalitarian old ethic attempts to repressively and viciously control individual psychology from the inside out as well orchestrated from the outside in, through the now-neurotic and hopefully disruptive fear of being ruinously slammed by serious character defamation. Political philosopher Herbert Marcuse, as we know, calls the underlying form of thought-control guiding such righteous-appearing enactments of threat and disempowerment “one-dimensional thinking,” which there so terroristically operationalizes the “closing of the universe of discourse” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 84) to better liberatory possibilities. He decries its especially pernicious quality in reproducing “the one-dimensional man [sic], the enforcer of totalitarianism in modern times” (p. 43).

Then, The Blog—A Short Summary

Karen’s blog commentary on the One Archives protest starts off by saying that “I don’t do gossip,” but then she goes on to say that she’s “had an itch to tell a particular story,” one in which she is personally involved. She introduces the “Players,” who include Harry and then Don, and how she came to know Harry (“I’d see this tall, skinny old man who always wore bead necklaces and flowery hippie-type shirts at different ACT UP and Queer Nation demonstrations”). She tries to define the Radical Faerie concept: “The basic idea was to explore gay soul and gay identity, springing off the creative work of gay men such as Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter.” This is the only place in her statement where she evidences any historical interest other than that motivated by her own vindictiveness.

At this point, she introduces knowing me, and that I was “partnered with performance artist Tim Miller,” that we’d come to ACT UP demonstrations, that I wrote for the LA Weekly for some years and was “skewing or creating details to enhance a story” in ways or instances which she never specifies. She then proceeds to talk about “Michael Callen’s Last Days.” (Michael Callen was a famous singer, activist, writer and beloved movement figure who succumbed to AIDS in 1993, and with whom I grew quite close over several years, so much so that I became his primary caregiver during the dying process). Karen says she “signed up with Doug” at some point to help with Michael. She then describes how she and Michael subsequently bonded deeply such that she gratifyingly officiated over an emotionally healing, death-bed reunion with his biological family as he lay expiring, of which event I did not approve when I then later heard about it from her such that I responded by meanly yelling at her. Karen details this latter story in a section entitled, “Doug Sadownick’s Scream,” where she entertains for a millisecond the possibility that I might have had a point in confronting her, only to summarily dismiss that notion. She clearly was powerfully disturbed by this heated emotional encounter between us (I actually didn’t remember the situation with the same potency, and consequently had been flummoxed about why Karen had seemed friendly yet so distant these many years—a dissociation on my part? Or a state of being nonplussed due to resentment-filled insincerity on her part? A combination of the two?).

She subsequently goes on to add that the death of Michael and the coincidental Northridge earthquake “triggered an emotional breakdown from all the unprocessed grief,” which was then much helped by Don Kilhefner, who told her that she was on a “spiritual quest,” which Karen says gave her “a positive way to contextualize the overwhelming darkness” (Don evidently didn’t talk to her about how her “overwhelming” feelings could have been ultimately sourced in her having been badly imposed on from infancy by heterosexism and other terrible influences; okay, maybe befriending the crushed-little-girl-inside-of-us isn’t for everyone, no?).

She then discusses “The Mitch Walker Connection,” where she starts by noting that her “awareness of Doug resurfaced in 1998,” when she heard from Harry that Mitch and “his own little band of followers—including Doug“ were now “viciously attacking” Harry. She additionally says that she knew Mark Thompson was also having trouble with Mitch, me and other “member[s] of Mitch’s clan,” such that Mark was “being inundated with nasty letters attacking his character” by this ill-intentioned “small group,” members of which then showed up at a local bookstore reading for his new work (Gay Body, 1997) and “shouted ‘shadow’ questions” at him such that he became “so frightened” he had to be “hastily snuck out the back” by two friends. Karen thought, here were “some jerks making nuisances of themselves,” but later on she found that the matter persistently “gnawed” at her because “Clearly, they had so terrorized Mark...that [it] essentially killed his book career.” Concludingly, Karen indicates that I, Mitch and friends were and are no less scary than the “White Aryan Resistance” from whom she and a lawyer associate had earlier in her activist career suffered some awful intimidation, yet, “I wasn’t afraid of a handful of screaming therapists,” she says she told Mark and Harry when they warned her about the dangerous “little band” of Mitch and “his followers,” to which brave proclamation of hers they alarmedly responded, “They’ll come after your dogs.” That “gave me pause.” She also notes that Don had called us “cult-like.”[6]

More Lies (Or the Conquest of Unhappy Consciousness)

Karen explains her refusal to cover in a timely manner the quite newsworthy fact of the creation in Los Angeles of the country’s first academic LGBT graduate specialization in clinical psychology and that I had been named its founding director, a project she further demeans in her blog statement by making it only about me (“When Doug contacted me about doing a story on his new endeavor—he had a Ph.D. now—I balked”), through the claim that she was privately still too upset about the Michael Callen screaming imbroglio to be objective, and thus she’d “have to recuse myself from anything related to Doug Sadownick” (An article on the Specialization in Frontiers not by Karen did appear about a year after its start).

Here she is confusing me (actually, the image in her mind of me) with an important, even historical gay landmark with which I was (and still am) involved, the pioneering Antioch program, a censorious pattern she repeats as well with what in my opinion is an even more significant project, the first legitimate organization that I am aware of in the world devoted to disciplined research and professional education about estimable homosexual personhood, the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis, currently in its fifth year of innovational operation. She seemingly forgets that I also phoned her regularly about Institute monthly talks and lectures. She furthermore adds, “I think I did a brief on his new LGBT Specialization psychology class.” By again reductively alluding to the Antioch project as “his...class,” she also keeps minimizing what the university faculty and I were trying to ambitiously do collectively in trailblazing that novel educational and training domain (for example, we developed a competent LGBT-affirmative curriculum vetted by the University and an assembled Advisory Board, a roster of affirmative instructors, a Community Partners Board, national funders, and working alliances with groups as diverse as the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center, Division 44 of the American Psychological Association, the Southern California Lesbian and Gay Psychotherapy Association, and LA Unified School District’s Project Ten, etc.), all of which I had been sharing with Karen when it was being organizationally established.

She adds, “for the most part, I shuttled everything over to the features and calendar editors—which was actually appropriate since therapy-related stories are more ‘lifestyle’ than news, anyway.”

Not true: She actually has written quite a lot about “lifestyle” issues when they were in her opinion newsworthy. As she herself later puts it in her statement, “I've written about Harry and about Don's more recent efforts” journalistically in addition to composing “an advancer for IN Los Angeles magazine” on Don’s behalf. In addition, she reported in some detail on last year’s West Hollywood Gay Men’s Forum, which I had a big role in organizing and participating in, and which was an event oriented completely around “lifestyle.” Her report, by the way, left out any mention of my own involvement and the very successful panel presentation I set up and moderated, which had to do with the importance of gay-affirmative psychotherapy in the lives of gay men—a breakthrough topic in a community generally antsy about publically broaching notions such as gay therapy and gay shadow.

Marcuse diagnoses the kind of morally-compromised gay culture being attemptedly created by the likes of Don Kilhefner and Karen Ocamb as only seemingly progressive, because as viewed from both his perspective and our more gay-centered one, it would certainly amount to an unfortunate “desublimation” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 56)—a dangerous regression. The “failures of this society,” Marcuse writes in terms of the problem more broadly, “invalidate its higher culture. The celebration of the autonomous personality, of humanism, of tragic and romantic love appears to be the ideal of a backward stage of the development” through which it has actually come in terms of the oppressive loss produced by one-dimensionalizing reification. Marcuse could be as well describing what happens to the gay liberation movement when it backslides hypocritically into assimilationist de-gayification due in significant part to those self-selected people who (modestly of course!) deem themselves out of reactionary psychic motives the most homosexually moral and/or avant-garde. The highest gay calling in Karen’s blog narration is happy reunion with one’s biological parents, and, as I discussed earlier, Don’s supposedly ground-breaking ruminations amount mainly to platitudes, complaints and nostalgia. Writes Marcuse, “what is happening now is not the deterioration of higher culture into mass culture but the refutation of this [more sophisticated] culture by reality” (p. 56), a now-manufactured or at least well-laundered “reality.”

More Attacks, More Liquidation

Karen spends the rest of her blog statement attacking the protestors (and Mitch Walker, the imputed Svengali behind these troublemakers), for example giving hell to activist Wendell Jones for trying to talk about how Don and Mark seemed to be, as she quotes Wendell, “asking to be confronted about the distortions, manipulations and abuse of power they have actually been maliciously generating for a long time” (see “Original Protest Announcement” in the March archives of this blog, which Wendell had emailed to Karen prior to the demonstration).

She makes fun of Wendell’s psychological articulations (“OK—so Don and Mark are ‘asking to be confronted?’ Abuse of what power?”) by referring to her inner college psychology textbook to then professorially suggest that Wendell “seems to be doing his own projecting” onto Don and Mark, who she sees as “two gentle human beings” (she must not have gotten whipped–or fisted!—by Mark at any time over the last several decades!). She also mocks Wendell’s concern that Mitch’s gay-centered psychological vision is being made to disappear by making the concern only about Mitch the person (“Let Mitch write his own book”).

She also deprecatingly criticizes Mitch for himself not attending the demo (suggesting hypocrisy), and for not having contacted her about an advance piece (“If Mitch thinks that his views should be the basis for the next phase of gay liberation, why hasn’t he approached me to write a story on that?”). She again confuses personality issues with larger matters. Who said Mitch had to be at the demonstration? And, about the bigger picture, I approached Karen myself many times by phone and email to raise such sorts of more-encompassing concerns, but her hidden bias against gay-centered psychological ideas kept her from dealing with any real news that could have been at hand. She had no interest.

She now has the temerity to ask, “What’s Mitch afraid of?” Talk about projection. And then she unleashes her authority complex, “And what gives him—or his followers—the right to tell me about my goddamn ‘shadow’...when I have not asked for his ‘help,’ thank you very much.” As if anyone were talking to her in the first place.

Karen concludes her piece by saying that Don “had no idea what all the racket was about” regarding the protest, that he had personally confided “his truth” to her, about how “he was there and Mitch didn’t play as significant a role as his followers were suggesting,”[7] and that Harry and Mitch “had a big fight and Mitch left—leaving Harry and Don to do the actual organizing.” Not an ounce of what this supposedly-disingenuous reportage is delivering is factually transparent, as I illustrated above—indeed, from all appearances until this relatively sudden demur from Don, he worked quite amiably with Mitch in founding the Faeries and then bonded with him even more tightly to decisively break from Harry!

Finally, Karen also bemoans the fact that the “folks in the audience” could not find out about their history due to the screaming protestors, that “Instead they were treated to a confrontation by perennially petulant Peter Pans who seem to delight in tearing down others—in the name of therapy.”

Unfinished Family Business and Emotional Scapegoating

I think Karen’s mean attack against anything and anyone I am involved with is powerfully related to a very big resentment she has been holding for a long time against me personally. Why this private outrage of such a long-standing, bitter nature? She herself points to the answer, which has to do with how she felt deeply hurt by that reputedly too-hot action of mine such that “I have been estranged from Doug Sadownick” due to the Michael Callen screaming incident. She adds that she has since “avoided Doug and the people he hung out with.” In reality, she has been badly stewing about it for more than 15 years, and moreover has been waiting for a good time to vengefully vent in public this festering upset (“I've had an itch to tell a particular story for some time now—but because I'm personally involved, it never seemed appropriate”). She connects to the fact that this unresolved hurt-and-rage has colored her ability to report on important gay-centering developments taking place in our community. This strikes me as admitting to the disgraceful, long-term acting out of a terrible journalistic bias.

My working hypothesis about this big grudge is that Karen is conveniently hung up on feeling ongoingly hurtfully enraged at me as a needed dodge to safely avoid dealing with why it really bothers her so badly, why such a nettlesome resentment could be actually more-importantly sourced, maybe unrecognized, in some of her own unresolved worst feelings, perhaps about her own biological parents.

The meanspirited nastiness of her words and actions itself suggests such an interior psychodynamic accounting, as this underhanded kind of over-reactive adult vehemence is all too typically symptomatic of an emotionally badly-thwarted childhood, in my experience, and points to the urgent grassroots need for much more realistic strategies to effectively identify and address influential psychological factors related to the public good than stewing, holding grudges, acting out passive-aggressive envy by twisting history, disavowing of the problem through venomous blaming, and committing character assassination, as well as other nefarious forms of moral rape.

Writes political psychologist Dunlap: “The new psychological consciousness I am imagining could be harnessed to support individuals and groups to use their emotions ‘reflexively’ to activate foundational and emergent human capacities” (2006, p. 61). It is time, his book avers, to cultivate better psychological growth as the only effective form of politics available to us today.

Personal Limitations

A close reading of her blog narrative shows that Karen’s disparagement of me and my colleagues as “perennially petulant Peter Pans who seem to delight in tearing down others” is more realistically the projective acting out of her own, perhaps inwardly-dissociated, perpetual eagerness to be nastily “tearing down others.” After all, she mentions her “spiritual quest” only once in brief passing, as she keeps heaping on the scorn and mockery. Indeed, we learn nothing about anyone’s “spiritual quest” in her blog, only about other people’s bad sides (excepting for Don and Mark, who are merely so “gentle”). It seems to me that her dark enthusiasm espouses no positive vision, nothing redemptive, no way out of confusion or disillusionment, but what the German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche saw as that “slave revolt in morality” (Nietzsche, 1887/1969, p. 36) which took place when Christian values won out over Greco-Roman ones during the last two millennia, consequently contaminating people’s psychologies with a debilitating “ressentiment” (p. 38), a draining “great nausea” (p. 96) and preoccupational “bad conscience” (p. 95) which only enabled their deeper subjugation by unjust social power. A regressive judging and shaming compulsion of the ressentiment-sort appears to misdirectively inform Karen’s gay work and life, I would say from going through her comments.

When I first heard about Karen’s blog posting, I had a strongly-negative feeling reaction, in which my psychodynamic “inner parents” in the form of infantilely originated “complexes” provocationally fired up their critical self-attacks, fiercely castigating me for going to the demonstration in the first place, for ill-consideredly risking so much for so little, for being worthless as a person anyway, thereby meanly trying to sufficiently shame me into then defeatedly retreating to that pathetic den of impotent cowardice where I had hidden so much of the time as a child (and had I kept to the advice of these caricaturish parental figures, which I would never even have tried to escape at all!).

I also experienced myself emotively polarizing strongly against Karen, angrily feeling quite effectively hurt by her intended malice and subsequently thinking that she was now accordingly revealed as a vicious enemy whom I had to try to destroy back at least in kind or else be even more terribly smashed, which hateful reactive impulse, on account of my persistently partnering the related feelings and dedicatedly addressing the big concerns of those feelings directly inside since then, I do not anymore hold would at all make for a worthwhile venture.

The Question of Validity

I now sense a problem at this point in my argument, which is that it would appear my discussion of the situation, no matter how valid it may seem to me and others who agree with me, still and all espouses just one view among other equally-legitimate options concerning the points here at hand. Having admitted this, I also must say that there are fair ways for an honest reader to assess for the relative presence/absence of truthfulness, general “rules of thumb,” so to speak, that can help to reasonably weigh, in the midst of contradictory testimonies, whether one perspective could be more honest or accurate, if not more life-affirming, than another.

One such rule of thumb is to see if the logic of the argument internally holds up. Another is to see if a given argument includes the other side’s perspective: is it attempting to be fair-minded or does it enact polarized, black/white thinking, which is dehumanizing? Another important indicator as to the presence of what could be considered a legitimate dialectic in any argumentative discussion (meaning, an argument that is really going somewhere), is whether or not the reader can feel or sense the presence of healthy shame, as distinct from toxic shame, in the discussant’s voice. Political psychologist Peter Dunlap talks about healthy shame, or the faculty for appropriate self-modesty, as providing us with the ability to access diverse “emotions reflexively to activate foundational and emergent human capacities,” as helping us see past our own narcissistic injuries to appreciate how “emotions function to connect people to each other, to a shared image of the future, and to mutual action” (2006, p. 35).

One way to look at my effort here is that, through attempting to connect with my healthy shame by appropriately owning important relevant aspects of my own feelings and issues, I am thereby mounting a larger-framed dialogue with Karen’s less-dimensional statement in progressive regard to powerfully-pertinent issues which have long needed such better addressing theoretically and politically; she is, in a way, reaching out to me through the mean-hearted expression of her dark emotions in order, wittingly or not, to situationally help “activate foundational and emergent human capacities,” as Dunlap puts it, to there so dialectically contribute to effectively developing a new “shared image of the future” not yet coherently present but needed, even though there is so much one-sided toxic shaming, so much defensive violence on her part in this larger progressive endeavor.

The Relationship

Karen repeatedly indicates in her blog narrative that after her big scene with me, we had little interaction with one another. This is quite untrue. She doesn’t acknowledge that not only have I spoken with her many times over those 15 years, often substantially, and have sent her a variety of pertinent materials, but that Treeroots and then the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis, in which I have been significantly involved, have mailed and emailed Frontiers, In Magazine, and now Frontiers in L.A., all of which Karen has prominently worked at for decades, hundreds of descriptive announcements of their events during that time. I called her on a variety of occasions to try to talk about the larger themes of my gay-centered psychological activism. We actually had at least a dozen or so long conversations over the years, usually about items she wanted to address, particularly those related to her manic compulsion to be “that journalist” always on deadline, always writing efficiently and effectively about the extraverted world of political issues and civil rights struggles.

I also made sure to invite her to be part of the LGBT Specialization Advisory Board, to which she attentively responded via email (2-9-07) this way: “Thanks for the invitation to join your Board but I must respectfully decline” due to the generic problem of “conflict of interest” as a reporter potentially having to report on something she was otherwise herself involved in. But she then said she would be “happy to receive” updates and furthermore that she’d “be open to that lunch you talked about a while ago. Perhaps we can set up some time” soon. Yet despite many entreaties on my part, there never was any such lunch.

But we did talk! When that happened, she would sometimes go on for almost an hour, never once asking anything about myself, not to mention not having the courage to in any way indicate that she was in any significant manner upset with me, much less that it was on the massive scale her February blog revelation has now disclosed. And I did warmly invite her over to my house for lunch, repeatedly over the years. True, I never said, as I now wish I had, “gee, Karen, I am feeling, due to the fact that you have never covered the Institute, and have only tangentially covered the LGBT Specialization, that there may be some bad blood between the two of us. I have no idea what that could be since you seem openly friendly to me, but I would be more than happy to explore the matter with you.”

I am sorry that my own toxic shame may have gotten in the way of directly “cutting to the chase” with Karen. But for a long time, I had no clear idea what the matter was, and only began to hear that there was a controversy between Karen and me over the last year through the grapevine. I wish I had been better sensitively humane with her in the last decade and a half. But I came close, making sure to do what I could to cultivate her interest in the new frontier of gay-centered psychology as manifesting in the work of the Uranian Institute and the Antioch LGBT Specialization. I begged her to cover the Felice Picano reading we once were doing at the Specialization. She actually had promised me that she was going to come, but she never showed up.

To be sure, one way or another it must be so that a big aspect of the dilemma around me and Karen can still be traced to my own shadow dynamics. In my opinion Karen and I have a relationship that I have not fully honored. One could say that to some extent I objectificationally “used” her to help out with Michael, and once the project was over, I did what I have done in the past when my mother complex created a feeling of suffocation in the setting of any conceivable interpersonal closeness: I spit her out. Considering that it seems possible I did indeed scream at her, even strongly, wouldn’t it have been more “humane” had I more so tried to process with her what my and her feelings and reactions could have been? As the main caregiver in the Michael Callen saga, I should have arranged a better “closure” for all the caretakers, of whom Karen was an important figure. I would have done so if it were today, but back then I had not yet been initiated well enough into dealing with my own icky shadow relations, and was in some ways unconsciously pretty wobbly. With the ongoing help of therapy and friends, especially those at the Institute who regularly “fry” me, often publicly and quite lovingly, for still untamed narcissism, I am of the considered opinion that I have grown to a certain degree and integrated some of those violent gay shadow issues sourced in my own infantile poisoning from a suffocating heterosexist regime, though I also admit that I still have a ways to go in this improvemental direction!

Of course, one could hope that Karen would be more so a grown-up here herself and not stoop to cheaply demonizing my prior actions, but instead to fairly consider trying to contextualize the possibly gay-centering and even dignified reasons for my screaming at her, if I did indeed do so. But Karen seems to be a staunch enemy to gay-centeredness, as I will show, and to gay-centered psychology in particular. Before I tell my “Michael Callen story,” I’d like to take one more digression in the next two sections to define what is meant by “gay-centeredness” and to describe its worst kind of enemy.

Gay-Centered Philosophy

Without a gay liberation movement based in a richly informative gay-centered wisdom tradition and attendant worldview (alive-and-well, although few on the street know about this vitalizing library of homosexual mystical knowledge), we would not today be able to value or experience gayness as an estimable phenomenon distinct from the heterosexual.[8]

In this regard we owe, actually, a great founding debt to ancient Plato and the homo-centric way he so memorably answered the classic questions as to what constitutes the Good, the Just and the Eternal. And let’s not forget Sappho, and how her lesbian-loving, Aphrodite-adoring sensate-singing always seems profoundly related to identity-making and self-realization, an inspiring point about how it is that lesbian love and individuality are two sides of the same coin in Sappho, as taught to me by the late lesbian-centered psychotherapist/activist Sandra Golvin. This ancient naming of archetypal same-sex love by the likes of Plato and Sappho as fundamentally distinct from all others for its spiritualizing and personhooded qualities sets the stage for a gay-centered philosophy of being gay that has been the leitmotif not just of our own, same-sex-loving lineage but also, in the form of the overall drive for discrete subjective personhood, that of Western Civilization altogether to a certain significant extent. Plato endowed same-sex procreation with its own spiritualizing Goddess, Aphrodite Urania, saying this fecund amativity was the true source from which sprang culture, art and philosophy in general, and homosexual self-realization in particular.

These gay-centered, “Uranian” Platonic motifs were then amplified in one ecstatic form or other by the Neo-Platonists of the later ancient and medieval Western worlds, as well as by the Muslim Sufis, and also, then, by the trouble-making homosexuals/alchemists/scholars who fomented the radical developments of individual being and becoming called Humanism, followed by those of the European Renaissance, all paving the way for the eighteenth century Enlightenment, which saw the first public separation of religious “faith” from logical “reason,” and then the subsequent period of emotional growth on the basis of that new division, called Romanticism (which paved the way for the parallel and cross-pollinating emergence of modern feminism, gay liberation and psychoanalysis). Both the sense of an autarchic personal identity and a self-referencing, same-sex-loving freedom movement, among other such interconnected phenomena, can be seen to start coming of age, then, as related evolutionary culminations of our ancient forebears’ early homo-centric sensibility, in such bold works as that of Friedrich Nietzsche, with his erotic same-sex image of the overman of greater individuating consciousness, Zarathustra (Nietzsche, 1892/1966; also see Nietzsche, 1882/1974, 1886/1989, 1908/1967; also see Kaufmann, 1974), on the one hand,[9] and on the other, the more emphatically homosexual work of roughly-contemporaneous authors such as American poet Walt Whitman (“Song of Myself”; “Calamus” [1881/1996]), British sociologist and mystic Edward Carpenter (Intermediate Types [1914/2008]) and German lawyer Karl Ulrichs, the first public gay political activist, who gave his life fighting for the rights of “Uranians,” as he called us starting in the 1860s (see Ulrichs, 1898/1994), an “out” homosexual tradition that formationally then moves into contemporary gay male terms by way of people like ex-Marxist Harry Hay and now psychologist Mitch Walker (a legacy I pointed out earlier being named by Don Kilhefner in one of his letters to Mitch!).

This historic depth based on the recurring transcendental substantiality inherent to being what today we generally call “gay,” based on that incredibly yummy orgasmic stuff we feel when we fall in love or cum with another person of the same sex (or while fantasying of another such person), especially when persistently and consistently undergone: that’s what gay-centeredness is all about. Gay-centeredness means to prioritize and focus on homosexual experience, value and possibility, to align with a same-sex-loving point of view in the face of its continuous captivating enunciation, in particular to seek accordance with the perspective of Gay Spirit, the fundamental archetypal inspiration to specifyingly form an abiding homosexual romantic orientation to erotic adult love. Purposefully seeking to cultivate overall a better gay-centered attitude and approach helps to more tangibly engage this most flavorful same-sex-loving essence, or homosexual “god-energy,” inherently resident inside our increasingly receptive, inseminating feeling life to its furthest accessible reaches, helps to refreshingly and rejuvenatingly discover in a more tangible and conscious sense that numinous divinity transpersonally available within the vital experience of homosexual essentiality which primordially “turns us on” to begin with, makes us fall passionately in queer love to top it all off, and moreover then provokes us to risk terrifying social sanction in order to viably “come out” and live honestly as self-respecting same-sex-loving people. Gay-centered theory and practice is all about bringing this generous spiritualizing and personalizing homosexuality out of its centuries’-long hiding place and enhancedly enabling its fabulously tasty fruit to again satisfyingly ripen in its own safely-autogenous habitat, the habitat of one’s own living gay soul.

Gay and Lesbian Child Development and the Problem of Assimilation

From the affirming perspective I am here focusing on, then, the serious and sustained attempt to better be gay-centered ideologically and feelingly affords gay-identified people a potent tool or practice to expeditiously help ourselves advantageously align more accurately and satisfyingly with our sourceful gay essence, and thereupon participate more so as a functional co-partner in its better lifespan actualization both within the inner world and in relation to the outer as well. Logically speaking, it would then seem, without an intrinsic sensibility to be gay-centered, we could not significantly evolve or individuate in a gay way individually or collectively to begin with or any further, we could only stay pretty well undifferentiated for the most part in the heterosexist group mentality. So one can say that assimilationism is the attempt to undo being gay-centered.

In the more psychoanalytical and Jungian terms of interior personal life, the gay shadow problem heavily induced by longterm heterosexist oppression most importantly concerns a noxiously-lingering sense of valuational inferiority as gay foundationally arising from how the evolving proto-homosexual baby was inevitably mis-“handled” literally and emotionally from its early caring environment on, first “pre-Oedipally” by a heterosexistically-trained mothering figure.

Gay psychologists Alan Blum and Van Pfetzing (1997) say that every child who accordantly grows up to become gay-identified unfortunately experiences a terrible psychic assault to the nascent self from homophobic parents incapable of aptly mirroring the various layers of particular emotional need emitting from such a queer child, thereby provoking massive levels of dissociation in that child akin to what victims of sexual trauma suffer from, with parallel later consequences.

Then there is the Oedipal challenge of middle childhood dramatically entailed in the already-traumatized gay youngling’s emergent formation of an unselfaware libidinous attachment endogenously to the same-sex parent, who most likely is feeling implicitly/explicitly homophobic towards any such erotic-romantic childish interest. One bad trauma then gets overlaid on top of another.

Once becoming an adult, it is possible to constructively differentiate these trauma layers inside by learning to listen carefully to the intimate feelings of one’s wounded gay shadow self. It is furthermore possible to then personify and follow these layered childhood feelings on a resolutionary descent to the difficult personal underworld, there to effortfully engage in a restorational dialogue dialectically with crushed and banished “part-selves” entailing nurtured empathy, probing exposure and thorough processing. Herein, if one can open up sincerely and participatorily enough, one undergoes an emancipatory death from the scapegoating grip of heretofore toxic self-feelings and the noxious, one-dimensional, heterosexist thought arising therewith, followed by a transmuting alchemical rebirth into a dynamically-expanded, gay erotic consciousness, basis of a successful social life as a relatively sound and loving homosexual person, and which can then salutarily lead to even additionally-enhanced subjective homosexual developments throughout the full lifespan and possibly even beyond.

But who can productively descend this homosexually-assertive way purposefully and consciously without sufficient reasonable help, such as without seriously-enough embracing a gay-centered theory and practice?

No wonder Karen is so upset with me for energetically confronting her, if her truly best-upheld loyalty indeed lies in the self-betraying alignment of toxic shame I would argue her blog discussion reveals. Still, it is too bad that she takes her big shame and consequent enragement out on me and others who have a drop of a good idea in an ocean of tired clichés and flatulent bromides about this terrible kind of imprisoning homosexual self-harmfulness, rather than, more appropriately and realistically, on her parents, who most likely swam continuously with her in that kind of numbingly rotten sea of suffocating cruelty.

Perhaps the more severely or crucially a particular gay person is psychically injured in trying to grow up gay, therefore, the greater the resulting tendency shamefacedly to then misbegottenly identify (consciously or otherwise) with one’s ubiquitous abusers of the past and present, and so the greater proclivity to subsequently become in some distorted but relieving manner like one’s heterosexist mom and dad, and finally to then righteously, guilt-trippingly trash getting the gay-centered assistance one consequently would need to develop more wholesomely as valuably homosexual.

This victimizational diversion away from appropriately attempting a fuller gay self-realization toward persistently upholding the loyally-breeding parents overestimationally instead, as sourced operatively in homophobically-inflicted childhood pain and shame of a most cruel and absolute sort, I think is at the bitter heart of the later bad hunger for a vitiating adult gay assimilationism—a conscious and/or unconscious craving to more so be what mom and dad would have most fondly liked one to be, without giving up gayness altogether, rather than to further grow actualizationally into that queerly-singular uniqueness one actually feels his or her homosexual self to be most interested in fully substantifyingly becoming deep down inside—as it is at the poisoned heart of Karen’s nasty diatribe against me, as I will soon attempt to more so parse out.

The shame-based gay wish to self-compromisingly assimilate, then, like some kind of malignant disease or addiction, arises destructively out of a living problematic situation, here, that of the dialectical, psychological tug-of-war involved in the core subjective struggle to be more or less wholesomely identified with one’s homosexual libidinal drive. Because we same-sex-loving people have all been raised in societies profoundly heterosexist, continually brainwashed from birth to utterly distrust our own gay essence, our own natural tendency, the lastingly-foul result in us is to neurotically (if not sociopathically) resist our own homosexuality in its more-considerable implications if not altogether, to minimize, compartmentalize, and reduce same-sex love’s larger shamanic call for each of us and indeed for all humanity: this is the morbid divisiveness and self-consuming thwartfulness that gay assimilationism humiliationally amounts to. The orienting desire for such thorough and therewith supposedly-humane integration inspirationally arises from and in turn disproportionately seeks to reinforce a psychologically-sourced alienation in feeling and thought from being harmonically and advantageously more gay-centered. Such a self-betraying position unfairly and perpetuatingly privileges those familial, religious, political and corporate systems that, rancid from long-unchallenged excess, flagrantly continue to situationally control and dominationally extend terrible unjust power up to the very moment.

In stark moral contrast to this latter state of affairs, a counter-sensibility that alternatively seeks to legitimately honor gay-centeredness in feeling and thought thereby politically foregrounds metaphorical Uranian systems of autarchic self-realization as well as a larger freedom from toxic homophobic shame and all the other terrifyingly-imprisoning subjective features of lingering, severe childhood trauma misbegottenly arising from a gay life inevitably raised in heterosexist, one-dimensional tyranny and hatefulness. Of course, differing attitudes of gay-centeredness and gay assimilationism can also overlap or exist simultaneously in a person. The question here is about how conscious a homosexual individual can be about his or her approach to being (or not being) gay. Is it a gay, a heterosexist or a mixed approach? Is it one aiming to become more constructively, self-reflectively aware or not? Indeed, can one be consciously attempting to be gay-centered or gay-affirmative, yet still be unconsciously powerfully heterosexist?[10]

The Big Scream (as it were)

If we were to look at Karen’s blog statement in regard to that last question, it would appear that the answer is indubitably yes.

Karen’s main attack on me in her commentary, which takes up its middle section, concerns her big criticism as to how I handled, or mishandled, her following the precious dying moments of Michael Callen, and how and why she has been holding a resultant tremendous grudge about it for more than 15 years. I meanly screamed at her, she says. She is quite upset about this awful utterance, being the good person that she is. She writes, “I told him about what I thought had been a miraculous reconciliation before Michael died,” and then, horror of horrors, “Doug suddenly started screaming at me.” She quickly repeats the word “screaming” two more times for greater emphasis: “Literally screaming,” and “He was screaming something.”

Karen says I was enraged or offended about how she “had violated Michael's very being” because she had spontaneously decided, apparently as the only figure of such authority present at that moment, to generously officiate over a momentous death-bed conversation where an estranged Michael was redemptively invited to finally forgive his family. “So when his family called,” Karen relates of this opportune incident during Michael’s final moments in the hospital, she “told them Michael didn't have much time and they should tell him they loved him and say goodbye,” and that Michael had then been sufficiently coherent to speak with various family members, including his mother, who was thereupon busy “promising to bury his ashes under his favorite apple tree in their backyard,” which protestations then led the mother to say she loved her son, which accordingly prompted Michael to say, “I love you too, mom.” Karen observes about this exchange, “It was the last thing he said. He lapsed back into a coma—as if he'd been holding out to say those goodbyes.”

She says I yelled at her because I outragedly held that she had selfishly betrayed Michael’s last wishes, that “Michael didn't want to have anything to do with his family” in any way at the end. For the fourth time she uses the “s” word, recounting that “then Doug started screaming at me about how this was really all about me and my shadow—by which he apparently meant my Jungian shadow. This was all about me wanting healing with my family who had abandoned me—on and on and on,” which characterization of the event suggests that I was badly berating her, that I was aggressively acting out a nasty hidden agenda, that I really didn’t care about her or even Michael, and that I had indeed, to top it off, meanspiritedly “choose[n] this moment to be so cruel” to her, as she then speculates about the event. She subsequently uses this supposed vicious cruelty to justificationally go on to a following, even more total character defamation of myself as well as of all my currently-closest colleagues, in particular Chris Kilbourne, Wendell Jones and especially Mitch Walker.

My Shadow Descent

When I first heard from a colleague about Karen’s malign account of what she claimed was my malicious, harmful screaming at her (as well as her other outrageous falsifications), internal quandaries related to my own existential truth (or lack thereof) exploded emotionally in my face, sending me on a rapid descent into my feeling underworld to face a still traumatically disordered and childishly fragmented part of my own interior object relations, and then I—you can guess!—screamed! This felt shakiness around my own existential ontology, which I have been trying to better address practically and comprehensionally over the last twenty years of conducting my own gay-centered inner work, was thereby helpfully revealed to me, yet again, as sourced in a yelling infant who had frustratedly never gotten empathically held, and for a while, at that candidly self-revealing level of subjective attentiveness movingly opened up by my initial affective reactions to Karen’s assaultive effort, I did feel suffocatingly trapped in the complex world of this infant’s early pain and misery, consumed by depression, fear, hurt and shame. Now I was well constricted emotionally into my own trained one-dimensionality of mind in pertinent regard to then reasonably perceiving what was happening in myself and in the outer world, due to highly charged, still-unresolved subjective issues influentially operating in my own personal sense of self.

As friends then fortunately helped me to gradually tease apart my crushing affects of terrible abjection due to bad child abuse as clarifyingly distinguished from perception/assessment of the situation taking place objectively in public, and also to better dialectically engage the “borderline” or more-insane aspects of my badly-devastated self there so being once more painfully opened to my struggling attention, I began to better appreciate that Karen’s provocative attack was not so much a thrust primarily to be taken personally, even though directed at me in large part, as it entailed something more encompassing and pertinent, that in fact, her perfidious assault was initiating a needed airing out of that malignantly-entrenched subjective business which had been cumulatively festering unaddressed for a terribly long time already, not merely in myself and Karen, but in the gay community and all of society as well. The insight also arose that what was morally required of me in the challenging situation presented by Karen’s iniquitous blog statement, besides my continued inner work, was not to remain publically silent in the threatening face of her hostile advances, was not to only be badly frightened by my vigorously-triggered shame and indecision, but to do what I could realistically to infuse the conversation with a much-needed and more progressive dialectic. As my awareness of myself as an ethical being in the situation thuswise became helpfully more clear, I could better empathically appreciate how Karen’s ample psychological transference onto me was aggravating enough in its generous enactment to make any sane person scream, which I then did again, but no longer at her, rather at the terrible affective and cognitive forces in me that were supporting her nasty effort, treasonous motivations sourced in my own immature complexes and in the corresponding temptation of one-dimensional thought that would soothingly like to either mortally polarize with Karen or beat a cowardly retreat into personal fear and isolation.

Helping and Setting Limits

“A good psychotherapist helps clients bear and direct the difficult feelings that may be at the root of depression or anxiety,” he says (Dunlap, 2008, p. 23). “A good leader does the same.”

Peter Dunlap (2008) is engaged, in his book on “psychological liberalism,” to find a “new hybrid language,” a “new branch of psychology,” a “transformative political psychology” aimed at creating a novel kind of leader, a “transformative political psychologist” (p. 23) engaged in performing a fresh kind of healing, not just one-on-one, but also in the world at large, thus so pioneering what he calls “political therapy” (p. 24). What is at stake in this effort, he says, is that almost everybody is terribly frightened of the future. They are fearful of it because it is “strange” and magical and therefore disruptive. Speaking subjectively, then, people are afraid of the difficult emotions triggered by anticipation of an uncertain future, so to defend against that they cling more so to the status quo and its apathetic but safe ways—yet even to the point that it kills them, or us?

Sometimes it is good to say to unruly children, to dysfunctional clients in psychotherapy, as well as to psychologically irresponsible adults in general: enough is enough!

My Michael

Getting back to Karen’s core complaint, she correctly points out that when “AIDS activist, writer and singer Michael Callen started falling ill, Doug organized a team of people to be his care providers.” She also accurately says that Michael, “along with Richard Berkowitz and their doctor Joseph Sonnanband [sic], virtually invented the idea of safe-sex and Michael also co-founded HIV/AIDS organizations that directly involved PWAs. Michael was also the star singer of the Flirtations, the famous gay male acapela group.” All else in relation to the Michael story, at least according to my perspective, she badly distorts.

I grew close to Michael when he moved, as many of us New York City-expats did, to take up a healthier and more gaily-spiritual life in Los Angeles, the birthplace of the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faerie Movement, and, in Michael’s case, to flee from some vicious shadow projections he was getting as a fey Cassandra who had been warning the gay community even early on in the AIDS crisis that unsafe sex practices were killing us. The fact that Gay Related Immune Disorder, which was what the disease was called back then, was caused by something easily spread through sex, was not information which many gay people, particularly men, wanted to hear circa 1983. Rather than change their own risky behavior, some individuals persistently sought to destroy Michael, even though he offered a sex-positive intervention, namely the use of condoms and the lessening of unsafe practices.

So Michael finally journeyed to California in Sept. 1990 to develop a new gay life, and he did so without his longtime lover, all by himself, without much if any support at all. He moved into a dilapidated HUD apartment in the run-down Hollywood of the time, where he wrote dozens of letters a day, read countless books on anything gay he could lay his hands on, and worked to figure out why he was suffering from so much endemic psychological pain. He was exquisitely proud of himself that, after living in L.A. for more than a year, he “finally,” as he put it, hauled his ass into treatment with Richard Levin, a leading exponent of the then-emerging school of gay-affirmative psychotherapy, who worked at APLA. Because I myself had entered gay-centered therapy three years before, and because both of us were increasingly feeling deeply moved by the basic principles of what we were learning therein, namely that a crushed gay child lay in tremulous hiding among the foggy recesses of our uncharted unconscious psyches, a sweet fey youngling badly bashed but not really destroyed by foul heterosexist parenting, Michael and I in consequence formed a deep bond together after we first became reacquainted and then more involved with each other in town (we had previously been casual acquaintances in N.Y.C.), as I will detail more of below, a sincere, loving and growing communion based on the mutual kinds of unprecedented insights we were each appreciatively gaining from the therapy situation, particularly from a gay-affirming sort of psychotherapeutics, which healing realizations both of us could then savor more so together as the finest kind of valuable consequence to our deeply-involved participation in the gay liberation movement we each had known to date.

At the time Michael moved to L.A., I myself was not so clear on how my own life was going to proceed. Until I had hauled my ass into therapy at the age of 29, I had lived mentally as it now seems to me most people do, in a kind of sickly existential cloud of hazy obscurity as to who I really amounted to in an inner sense, so that I based all my self-worth, such as it was, on externally oriented situations, like my already long-term romantic partnership and my power position as the town’s then most-published gay journalist. To this extent, I lived psychologically in a co-dependent merger with my world at large, which meant in practice that I anxiously suffered neurotically to a considerable extent and was pretty much confused, resentful, passive aggressive, and badly stuck developmentally (all of which I covered up in various defensive ways, though fat does not lie—and I am today indeed more trim).

Frank discussions and self-confessions about such intimate matters cemented my growing bond with Michael Callen. Like the A-student he was, Michael was reading everything on gay psychology he could to augment his own inner work and also to build more of a connection with me. On top of this, he stepped up the convivial social wooing of my partner, performance artist Tim Miller, and myself that he had begun in concert with our growing friendship, using his Wildean wit combined with the androgynous mystique of his strong Two Spirit nature, to say nothing of his Martha Stewart panache at orchestrating elaborate, seven-course Marcella Hazan-informed “Italian Kitchen” meals in his tiny Hollywood tenement to hungry and depleted gay activists in search of warm maternal kindliness. He had no money but the finest virgin olive oil from Sardinia, and he liked to, as he would say, “pamper my new favorite gay couple.” But the real affiliation between Michael and me took place via gay psychology, as I told him about my dreams of Nazi concentration camps, with the head Kapo wearing the Medusa faces of my mother and father, and he shared that he had similar fascistic dreams about his own parents.

When Michael had asked Tim and me if we would legally assume his Power of Attorney, around the end of 1991, and to basically take care of him as he moved volitionally more so into his dying process, he said he was doing this because he could tell that he would find in us as it went along a sense and sensibility which allowed a person such as himself to, as he then frankly put it, die in the “most gay way possible.” My guess is that Michael wanted and needed a depth-sort of psychological method as much as he needed practical support in his bold aim to realistically attempt a better and, so to speak, more-homosexual dying experience for himself. He was one of those liberal atheistic types who no doubt considered ideas of Gay Spirit to be of some value and significance, but allowed his skepticism of any higher power other than reason to back him down when reason suggested that spirit was not a realistic hypothesis for himself personally (e.g., in regard to his love for men and dick as a force greater than his conscious ego). So he needed help to face his own resistance to what I would call the inherent intelligent will of his homosexuality, which I was happy to offer him, and, although he never himself attempted to cultivate a purposefully more-clearly-specific language about these subjective gay themes, he was beginning to appreciate and share in my budding efforts at the time to do so, which articulational attempts have continued to this day.

The arrangement made by Tim and me with Michael seemed by itself to set up a situation that put me centrally at the front lines of caring for Michael both materially and emotionally from then on, as it ensuingly turned out, for the following two years. Tim would be pretty continuously going on performance tours to bring home much of the bacon while I managed our domestic life as well as working on my journalism, helping run Highways Performance Art Space as an important board member, and, now, taking care of Michael as itself an increasingly full-time job. Michael, who had worked for years as a corporate secretary, then taught me how to be well organized in this latter venture as it quickly intensified with the growth of his needs, so as to minimize the burden he would make on my life. When things had progressed more, he pushed us to talk about the problem of psychological burdens also, even though he was just starting to get a sense as to how to better do that by the time of his death.

We touched on the dilemma of how two well-crushed gay men could get emotionally and physically close to each other and not feel overly burdened by the resulting intimidational proximity; how to deal with each of our mother complexes (e.g., Michael’s conflictual terror of and desire for dependency; my primitive wish to handle my own hurt-rage by becoming co-dependent with others and then resenting the consequent feeling of suffocation) and father complexes (e.g., for me as shown by how I could be aggressively bullying to Michael about his excesses, such as his perpetual mismanagement of funds, and his almost-obsessive need to make elaborate meals for everybody, even though eventually he could barely stomach a spoonful without vomiting and I was angry about all the weight I was gaining). The extent to which we addressed these painfully-intimate issues grew in fits and starts over time, a limitation hardly adequately resolved at his death, but our trying to better approach such previously-taboo areas was aided by the fact that both of us became increasingly committed to bringing the work of therapy to our political lives and to our personal relationship.

We were assuredly scared of dealing more directly with our emotional and historical shit, but we also did understand that the question of how to best handle the dying experience pulled out from the midst of our cowardice what Michael called “gay ethics,” or viable guidelines that could practically inform us in a good homosexual fashion as to how best to proceed more constructively. He would often tell me his dreams. I remember the one in which Michael fell into a pool and it was my mother who dove in to rescue him, and that he almost preferred to die than be helped by her. At first, he laughed at the absurdity of dreams, but when I pointed out what the dream might be saying, which is in part that something in his psyche represented by my mother’s desire to “help” (my mother did really epitomize that quality) might actually be trying to kill him, he looked at me with frightened worry. He never did come around to altogether accepting the notion that there was a godlike intelligence behind our dreams, but he did become increasingly more psychologically minded. Michael would be the one to ask, “what is up with us, you seem distant Doug-a-las?” or “When you tell me that I have to stop cooking, I get the feeling that you are my father, even though I know you are not,” or “When you are late to see me, I get angry and upset, but then I realize that you are as fucked up as I am, and thus you resent me in ways, and then I forgive you.”

There was also the issue of Homosexual Eros, which, I am embarrassed to say, I feel was not in some ways adequately enough handled by me or Michael, although, to be fair to both of us, I think we did the best that the blind-leading-the-blind could possibly bring about realistically. By the point that Michael had one year of life left to him, his lower body, from his groin down, had become covered in leathery purple KS lesions, especially his legs, where hardly an ounce of untainted skin remained. No one would touch him erotically any longer, even though he still sought out sex and love, and Michael, like all the rest of us, was to begin with touch-starved and acutely lonely. On top of that confounding deficit, he needed to be physically massaged because his ill and medicated body was quite stiff and often ached, even though he would never have dared to ask. He would return home to his Hollywood dump following chemotherapy treatment, where the mattress lay on the floor, feeling sick as a dog, and as rigid as a board. I would stop by, appalled to see the Diva of the acapela gay male singing world lying in the mortal dust of unjust homosexual suffering. At first, I was frightened and even disgusted to lay my own hands on the leathery skin. But the process of gay-centering inner work greatly helped me to see that what I was frightened of in actuality was “touching the skin” of my own inner felt monstrosity from having been repressively raised in the badly shaming way I was. I began to share these insights with Michael as I worked on his body, which he found fascinating and profoundly moving. With the help of Homo-eros, the defenses and hyper-rationalism Michael had inherited from his homophobic parents and a lifetime of living in N.Y.C., as well as my own parallel rigid disembodiment, began to erode between us.

With these so to speak hands-on conversations, Michael began to project highly-charged erotic feelings onto me of a profoundly numinous nature. I was of the same Jewish DNA as his former lover. Feverish, Michael would call out to me: “Richard, please, please, please hold me.” At such needful times, I would embrace him, but I am not sure if my horror and other reactivity about what was happening to him may have impeded Michael from reaching out further to me, again, a supposed failure on my part still humiliatingly plaguing my memories of those days. I struggled at the time with many challenging moments, where I would feel completely overworked, over-burdened, frightened, lonely, yet then again, I would also experience delightful confirmatory feelings of warmth, affection and inspiration in the way the whole situation was trying to open the door for me and Michael into some ultimately-wonderful shamanic hero’s descent, which for him, despite his avowed atheism, seemed to be happening quite involvingly. Had I known what I do now, I would have better directly invited him to see his romantic feelings for me as a projection of the archetypal double, that is, the same-sex “soul figure” in Jungian terms, and encouraged him to strive for a more conscious relationship to this supremely romantic “twin” inside (a homosexually-interiorizing tactic often discussed by Mitch Walker [e.g. in Walker, 2009], who points out its millennial heritage such as, for example, in regard to the Ka of the ancient Egyptians, the daemon of Platonic teachers, the Angel of the Sufis). As it was, I did my best to encourage Michael to seek enhancedly aware connection with his own gay soul as he moved inexorably towards his mortal end, but this effort was unfortunately compromised by my own lack of knowledge and by my intimidating terror of the intimacy involved.

The further Michael descended into a more depthful alchemical self-transformation, the more outlandish he became with both his body (he seemed by now to lack all shame about it), his expressions of erotic yearning (mostly for me, but also for a handsome intern or two), and then his irrepressible love of being gay, which he celebrated most involvingly through working to shape his musical legacy, through constant affirmative psychological vigilance of his crankiness and depression, with which he hardly ever burdened me, and through a desire to be around “gay people, hot alive, sexy gay men, at the last moments of my life.” One day he looked at me forlornly, maybe it was in the later summertime of 1993, and asked me plaintively to help his “dying bag of bones” relocate to the “Gay Ghetto of West Hollywood.” And because he knew that I could raise my voice, he put his hands to his ears and shook his head, proclaiming that the “Diva has spoken,” then mocking my protestations, imploring that we could raise the money for his move from his wealthy financiers (whose fat wallets, by the way, dried up the more he needed such people and the less he could entertain them).

It was during this subsequent Herculean move to West Hollywood, which occurred about three months before Michael died, that I recall consolidating the care group I had already been developing for some time, and which then involved Karen Ocamb.

It seems to me that I was experiencing difficulties in regard to Karen from the beginning of her involvement that I am sure I did not address well enough. At this point in time, she was not the big-name journalist she likes to think she is now. Depressed, sad and needy, she seemed to have no life of her own. It concerned me that she could compensatorily latch onto the situation with Michael. At times, I could not get rid of her, such as when Michael and I needed to talk privately. I didn’t want to fall into the trap of using her apparent neediness as an easy way to put her more so to work to then lighten my own load, but I did not have the kind of emotional and reflective support I now have to have worried that issue through sufficiently, I think, such that I am sure I probably exploited her seeming inner girl’s desperate need to belong, at least to some objectifying extent. In addition to the above concerns, I was skeptical of Karen’s general tonal attitude in regard to Michael’s parents, in that when she shared about the matter, she consistently favored the general importance of the family over that of a more gay-oriented position, a bias reflected in her seeming lack of awareness about a pact Michael had made with me about limiting his homophobic family’s involvement, which I will detail shortly. On top of these problems, Karen also showed tendencies during her participation towards being possessive of Michael, controlling of his care, even territorial, in addition to her quite-evident inclination to becoming overly involved.

But I believe I for the most part just looked the other way about all this, as long as Karen’s provocative features did not become too intrusive while Michael and I retained the main alliance and the main understanding of what was going on, which managerial arrangement, unfortunately, eventually broke down at the end.

By now in his own inner growth, Michael was actively engaged in seeking out the key ways whereby his endemic psychological pain was the bad result, in large part, of toxic heterosexist parenting. He was fit-to-be-tied about how his literal mother and father continued to uphold their supposedly-principled homophobic positions, this despite the glaring facts that he was dying from AIDS and had become one of the nation’s most renowned PWA (People with AIDS) spokespersons–and also one of the gay community’s most beloved singers. Michael had already developed through his probing self-considerations a gay-affirmative psychotherapeutic analysis of his mortal disease: part of the reason for his suffering both in getting infected/sick and often feeling so emotionally miserable about it, was foundationally due to the crushing assault on his basic humanity tormentingly suffered by him as a gay child—and this from a man who had never blamed anyone personally for anything if he could find any reason to take responsibility instead! He was, therefore, very clear with me about how he wanted to die—“as gay as possible! sans the parents!” He did not want his dysfunctional family invading when he was most sick, and especially not when he was at death’s door. He suspected that their guilt over their incessant homophobia would make them, still as selfish as ever, want to manipulatively and even coercively overcompensate at his deathbed, when he would have virtually no strength to fight off any smarmy, last-minute, parental reunional maneuvers. This gay-affirmative family systems strategy was then efficiently applied by a true and long-experienced queen of stage-management to subsequently arrange a carefully-orchestrated visit in which they would all say their goodbyes when Michael was still relatively strong. Michael asked that I stay involved the entire time and be in the room when his parents came on the appointed day, Thanksgiving 1993, so as to help him “hold my own” and “have a witness.”

His mom and dad were Midwest folk, the likes of which I previously had had little interaction with in my coastal big-city life, so they were pretty much cultural strangers to me. Indeed, they did appear oddly out of place ambling about in the gay wing of the hospital in their properly reserved clothes (with Michael’s brother, who also came but did not stay in Michael’s room during the big meeting), what with Michael as irrepressibly fey as ever. Although superficially solicitous, his parents were true and correct Christian conservatives who did not understand where Michael was coming from in the slightest. I could see that both held strongly heterosexist views about the moral inferiority of homosexuality, much less about that of being a homosexual person, even as they were discrete and polite, although it seemed to me his mother was more willing to bend; perhaps she had a maternal instinct that emerged despite her engrained biases, such that in the course of the meeting she did become more warm, present and humane with Michael, for example touching him and growing better attentively regardful, in contrast to the father, who remained physically cold, aloof and downcast. Michael’s father no doubt was in terrible pain to watch his son die, but he tried to hide it. He could not open up enough to accept Michael being a decent human being as a gay man even while he was with his ill son, even a little. He just would not give in on that level of compassion, through word or deed, although I think this supposedly-Christian, rejecting refusal grieved him much more than it did Michael, by the emotively-tense look on his face, as it appeared like he was fighting back tears a lot. Michael, I should mention, during the horrible course of his illness never lost either his outrageous humor or his human dignity. The weaker he got physically, the stronger he grew as a proud gay man, and that day with his folks, he was indeed in very fine form throughout!

As Michael and I had previously planned out, he was going to put “the question” to them once and fairly. When we were all together that day in his room, he proceeded to ask if they could love him unconditionally for being gay. His mother said yes, but his father could not answer. He could only put his head on Michael’s sunken-in chest and silently cry. Michael spent some time rubbing his own father’s head in a soothing fashion, as if to say, “I understand your limitations.” That was about it. When they soon after left, Michael announced to me with great gusto, “Doug-a-las, I have done my duty here and I am done, ‘D,’ ‘O,’ ‘N,’ ‘E’ - DONE!” He quite firmly indicated that he did not want to deal with them anymore, lugubrious as they were at best, that he instead wanted to move on, “and see where death will lead us now, darling!” To say the least more about how it was, we did then also have a good cry. And we spent a fair amount of time in the following days talking about how destructive heterosexist families can be to a homosexual person’s good connection to Gay Spirit. We were vexed yet curious about the most appropriate way to deal with them, inevitable yet toxic as they were. Neither cutting them off nor embracing them seemed like reasonable alternatives in satisfactory answer to this sticky problem. I seem to recall Michael telling me a bit later that he had reported his steps in dealing with the family situation to his therapist, who was staying in touch with him and who gave him much affirmation for his courageous Thanksgiving act of relative closure.

After the big hospital scene, I took his parents and brother out for dinner. Trained to be the “good Jewish boy,” I was charming and sweet. I also had no problem explaining to them, in a way they might understand better, where Michael was coming from. Michael’s father seemed more human and less rigid without his son present, a little more able to relate to me as a person who happened to be gay, in contrast to his handling of his fey progeny. I should also mention that, while I felt equitable enough relating to Michael’s family, I was at a period in my individuation where I was very angry at my own parents for a parallel stubborn refusal in them to also really accept me as gay. While I do not believe I acted any of this deeper anger out with Michael’s folks, I am sure that my later reaction to Karen’s telling me about what she did with Michael at the end was likely informed not just by my irritation with Michael’s domestic conditions and history, but undoubtedly also by my own then-unresolved family issues.

I should also mention here that Karen’s account in her blog statement of the Thanksgiving family meeting is radically different from my own, in that she claims to have been “the liaison” between Michael and his parents during the visit when in actuality I served in that role and she only had a minor supporting part (I have various care-group memos and correspondence with the family clearly indicating my central position in managing the event and the parents’ and brother’s later warm appreciation towards me for my generous help at that time), as she simultaneously paints me as disengaged and merely critical of the Thanksgiving visit and her supposed efforts as an otherwise much-thanked “buffer and go-between” even then on behalf of a better familial reconciliation with Michael, all of which is an outrageously self-serving distortion that significantly mars the actual history involved, although it is possible I was somewhat critical at this point with her due to those irritating qualities of hers which I outlined before being well-activated around her own very-modest involvement in the big Thanksgiving event.

Returning to Michael’s story, my memory is that his very slow physical decline began to speed up around this point, and things became more taxing. During what turned out to be the last weeks of his life, the repeated misery of being in the hospital, then being released, only to be returned again the next day (due to spiking fevers and nausea, for example) was scary and extra draining for him and me. At this time, Michael’s old partner, Richard Dworkin, was in town to see Michael and work on his final Legacy album, which Richard was producing, and they experienced something of a reconciliation. By now Michael’s support group, with Richard and Karen actively involved in this final period, seemed to be operating very well. After almost two years of giving Michael pretty much my full-time attention, and after assessing that I had developed enough of a viable network for him and that so far he seemed to be hanging in there persistently and adequately, I decided that I just had to take a temporary relative break from the constant 24/7 vigilance I had been attentively holding for some time now, in order to salvage my own quite-stressed-out mental and physical health! This is not to say that I in any way abandoned Michael, and in fact I am sure I saw him or talked to him at least once a day. Yet had I known how comparatively soon Michael was going to die, particularly considering his final wishes, I would not of course have relinquished so much of my direct involvement in his situation at that point.

My not being present as I had been before unfortunately created a comparative vacuum of leadership “on the ground,” so to speak, which I believe Karen wasted no time in trying to exploit within a matter of days by way of the pushy sorts of questionable actions and agendas I detailed earlier.

Back to Karen’s Distortions

Karen writes that when she told me she had single-handedly facilitated a deathbed conversation between Michael and his family, I had screamed at her—and I had done this just after Michael had, in a sudden downward turn, unexpectedly expired with neither Karen nor I present on Dec. 27, 1993. Unfortunately, I do not now precisely recall that final hospital engagement with Karen. I am sure it is quite possible I might have therein expressed some intensely-fiery emotion, especially given the already-charged context for me, such as my own grief and loss, my exhaustion, and perhaps even abandonment guilt over not having attended more closely to Michael’s final moments considering what then did happen and in light of my prior good cause to be irritably suspicious of Karen’s cloying manipulativeness. Still, I am sure I would have been less emotionally-susceptible about all this today, and less retaliatorily-inclined, knowing how complex family relations really are, and having worked on my own violence and emotional reactivity quite a bit since then. At the same time, it is also comparatively interesting to relevantly note here that when I recently spoke about the whole Karen blog attack to a well-known gay scholar who is interested in the history of Michael Callen, he responded by saying “so what” that I might have screamed at her, given both the stress of the dying process and the conflictual tension about what Michael really needed.

From Karen’s blog statement, it would seem that she was the unvarnished heroine in this story of our relations and Michael’s death, while I was an apparently-caring gay activist now more honestly revealed as a wrathful demon. It seems that everything she says about this matter in some way is meant as a slam against me, including the implication that Richard Dworkin, Michael’s ex, had flown in and “basically taken over,” because of what had become a badly neglectful situation. What her story reveals, however, despite her attempts to advantageously shape it, is her ultimate alliance with the assimiliationist component in the assimilationist/gay-centric dialectic:

I was with Michael the day he died. It was a Sunday and Michael's ex-lover Richard Dworkin (who produced Michael's Legacy Album), who had flown in from NYC and basically taken over, was taking a several hour break. Michael was in a coma but we believed he could still hear.

So when his family called, I told them Michael didn't have much time and they should tell him they loved him and say goodbye. I told Michael they were on the phone and then held the phone to his ear. First his brother, then his father told him they loved him and were proud of him. "I love you, son," his father said.

And then it was his mother's turn. She talked to him awhile—promising to bury his ashes under his favorite apple tree in their backyard. And then she said, "I love you, Michael. I will always love you."

A tear rolled down Michael's cheek. "I love you, too, mom." It was the last thing he said. He lapsed back into a coma—as if he'd been holding out to say those goodbyes. I talked to the family a bit and then hung up. Richard came back shortly thereafter. I told Michael I'd see him later and I left.

Two hours later, they called to tell me Michael had died. I rushed back to Midway. There seemed to be a lot of commotion. Doug and Richard were acting like rivals and Sandra Golvin was in the room howling in what was apparently some ritual. Richard told Doug in no uncertain terms to get her out of there. I waited a bit and then went in to say my goodbyes.

I do not remember this final situation at the hospital as Karen describes it, nor do I recall at any time being Richard’s rival. I remember he and I working only lovingly together, and we still have a warm rapport and eros to this day. To share another comment about what Karen is saying, as I read her assimilationist trashing of Michael’s gay-centering effort to live and die more gay, an assertive effort he was already explicitly naming in regard to his Power of Attorney arrangement with me and Tim nearly two years previously, I feel disgusted with how she self-servingly suggests that Michael had been “holding out” to say these last-minute familial farewells. While it is true that neither Michael nor I ever to my recollection explicitly carefully made clear to all the caregivers and/or Karen specifically what Michael’s last gay-centering wishes were, thus allowing Karen some “wiggle room” to justify her unilateral deathbed maneuver, it seems to me that her egotistical account of the matter erases what the whole goodbye scenario Michael and I had orchestrated the prior month when he was more conscious had been intending and, indeed, eliminates Michael’s entire philosophy of gay meaning that I am sure was common knowledge among all our group caregivers due to Michael’s continuous expression to everyone of what was going on for him and what was important in these terms, and becoming more gay-centered to him was growing ever more significant all the time as he moved closer to his finale!

The Tibetans have an idea that as a person dies, she or he enters into a variety of bardo states that bear on her or his further self-realization. I still find it offensively outrageous that Michael might have had his homosexual bardo experience meanly contaminated by what seems to me Karen’s last-minute assimiliationist-oriented violence. I also don’t like how Karen mocks Sandra Golvin’s lesbian-centered shamanistic presence at the deathbed. Even though Sandra did get very intense and needed to be calmed down, Michael had in life very much adored her fiery lesbian spirit and appreciated learning “the secrets of the tribe” from her. Sandra, who founded the pioneering Center for Sapphic Psychoanalytic Studies in Los Angeles in 2005, herself died in an untimely manner from ocular melanoma three years ago, a fact that Karen knows because she exchanged emails with me about publishing Sandra’s obituary (which appeared in IN Los Angeles Magazine in August 2006) but about which she mentions nothing when referencing her in the blog statement, suggesting that, to Karen, Sandra dead or alive is all the same. How anti-lesbian is that! Given our own homophobically-influenced limitations as caregivers and as persons, most of us around Michael still tried to help create a sacred, homosexually-oriented caregiving milieu. Karen malevolently elides this cooperative, gay-centric appreciation about and historically-pioneering approach to the matter of Michael’s death to this day in her seemingly still-compulsive need to backstabbingly advocate on behalf of her heterosexist parental complexes’ endlessly poisonous demands.

In retrospect, it now makes even more sense that I could have first handled hearing the big surprise from Karen about her nasty betrayal of Michael by spontaneously screaming at her. While I do not remember “the scream” itself as Karen recounts it, and certainly not with Michael’s body present or nearby, I am sure that I was capable of such an intensely-expressive oral action. What I do recall is a stern conversation with her in the hospital lounge, but I do not trust my memory completely. Here is how she puts this climactic exchange between us:

I wasn't alone with Michael for long when Doug came in. I told him about what I thought had been a miraculous reconciliation before Michael died—and Doug suddenly started screaming at me. Literally screaming. Just steps away from Michael. He was screaming something about how I had violated Michael's very being—because Michael didn't want to have anything to do with his family.

I said that's not true. And then Doug started screaming at me about how this was really all about me and my shadow—by which he apparently meant my Jungian shadow. This was all about me wanting healing with my family who had abandoned me—on and on and on.

He was so intense and persistent, I wondered if he might not be right. Sitting on a bench outside Michael's hospital room, I stopped and mentally went over everything. I checked my heart. I'm in a 12 Step program that requires rigorous honesty if I'm to stay clean and sober—and I went to that place and asked the question: did I facilitate the reconciliation between Michael and his family because of my own family issues?

The answer was no. Michael was my friend and this was always about him. I looked at Doug and wondered why he would choose this moment to be so cruel—in the name of being helpful.

A Considered Analysis

My and Michael’s gay-centering perspective on the salient importance to him of his deepening relationship to the symbolic death-and-rebirth cycle of the homosexual individuation process is, as I have pointed out, never even mentioned by Karen in any of her blog explications. In consequence there is the low implication that I possessed little besides my own selfish narcissistic agenda regarding Michael’s death, which ugly perspective I would suggest actually more likely reflects her own internal condition in the situation. She has rhetorically contrasted, in regard to our climactic confrontation, what she casts as my more-misguided motives with her own more-altruistic ones, which concern a kindhearted attempt to innocently aid a more-healing reconciliation at the end between Michael and his parents. I maintain that she is severely slanting the truth of the matter in this regard, that she is positioning herself thuswise not because she really cares about Michael or his family per se, her stated concern thereby amounting to a manipulative and exploitational performance, but rather because a larger hidden agenda subjectively lurks behind the issue intimidationally for her, one centered on the deadly fear of a possibly earth-shaking, gay-centered experience that she consciously or unconsciously feels she could not possibly bear because of the threat that would pose to her own addictive alliance with a heterosexual false-self system. If she can in responsive defense so-to-speak murder my side of a dialectic that really wants to play out more procreatively within her, a gay-focusing position which for me requires my persistently-dedicated attempts (sometimes quite lame!) at rigorous confrontation of my own hidden violence, and after that vengeful erasure if she can then functionally replace a real dialectic one-dimensionally with just her own consciously and defensively-held position against the evil enemy, then she has paradoxically “won” in subterfugingly doing the dirty work of the one-dimensional society towards herself and others. Her position looks gay-positive, as do those of Don and Mark. But, in actuality, all their pertinent views, I believe, hide a resolutely-heterosexist rotten core. If Karen allies with the other two, she does so, at the subjective motivational level I am here suggestedly considering, apparently in order mainly to thereby help her neatly continue avoiding having to personally entertain the dialectical problematic of abiding Gay Spirit and its antagonistic complement, gay shadow, troublesomely resident in her own felt experience of valuably and meaningfully being a homosexually-identified person.

The issue at hand cannot be reduced to whether or not one version of the story of what “actually” happened in our relationship or with Michael is merely true or false, although I am tempted to say that I am right and Karen is wrong! On the negative side, did I yell at her for selfish motives, and did she demonize me in her blog merely to attempt to destroy me and the gay-centering truths for which I try to stand? Or, on the positive side, did I yell at her to provoke better into historical time a very importantly-needed conversation, and did she officiate over a death-bed talk because that is actually what was more salutary for Michael, who had perhaps been pressured into denying an additional familial reconciliatory possibility by his and my own thoughtless one-dimensionality?

What if all of this is all partly true? My issue with Karen is not just about the fact that she says whatever it is that she is saying, although, to be sure, her one-dimensional accusations are painful and defamatory, and must be confronted. Rather, what seems most egregious is that she takes about one millisecond in her blog response to entertain the possibility that my big confrontation with her might have had any constructive merit, and, in turn, what that breezy tone then suggests about her own degree of accurate self-responsibility as a supposedly ethical person. In this evaluative light, notice how she characterizes our hot encounter and her own considerations about it in the blog section I just quoted above.

The lack of logically-reasoned, intelligent discourse in Karen’s thoughts and in our movement generally, the kind of more-sound consideration that would fairly allow for a multi-dimensional perspective on feeling life beyond the slightest nod to the opposite side in a heated debate, is the sorry fault of a collective repressive consciousness that still badly dominates us all, which of course is not just Karen’s responsibility, as it requires everyone to face, dare I say, the hypocritically-meanspirited Karen within.

The “false consciousness” which Herbert Marcuse talks about, that would permit any gay person to buy Karen’s well-cooked version of the truth, that confuses an agreeable appearance with true substance, that accepts emotional slavery described as objective freedom, is a long-term politico-psychological problem each of us must face sooner or later on the liberatory road, internally sourced so foundationally as that difficulty is for us homosexual folk, in my opinion, in having been contextually forced to “love” our closest homophobic oppressors, namely our parents, starting from birth, as we aboriginally attempted a gay maturational process in life. The basic confusion wrought by the above paradox as to what is “real” versus what is “promoted as real” on such a primal level of budding selfhood, usually assures gay people’s continued assimilationist loyalty to the heterosexist collective to some important extent, while it simultaneously keeps them effectively alienated from better attaining the greater inner reaches and procreative transpersonal treasures of the estimable gay psyche not only well beyond childhood but indeed usually throughout adulthood as well, such that the ongoing disorganizational effect of great social bigotry misfortunately amounts to a rolling dehumanizational quagmire in the subjective homosexual realm which in the end will objectively stymie our emancipatory movement in its very “success” as one sincerely dedicated to the most authentic and fullest gay liberation, not to mention what this toxically-pernicious kind of thwartful shadow psychology more generally could ominously mean for our entire species, if not more prudently forcefully dealt with overall.

The one-dimensional speed with which Karen makes her unilateral decision to grasp at a last-minute family reunion for practically-comatose Michael, can be interpreted in psychoanalytic parlance as suggestively due to a subliminal, yet overbearing, anxious need in that decisive moment to swiftly take up the powerful early defense called “splitting,” or self-protective dissociation from strongly-conflictual affective material, on account of a lack of tolerance for the larger pain involved in any deeper exploration of inner sticky feelings about a traumatic early childhood then being dangerously intimated in the intensity of unexpectedly receiving what was possibly some sort of manipulative family phone call just while Michael was in his last moments and just as he had feared. She does report undertaking a brief and superficial rumination about the matter in light of my subsequent challenge, only to quickly return to her self-righteous original position, “Michael was my friend and this was always about him.” She then does what anyone who refuses to responsibly face her shadow does under otherwise badly self-incriminating conditions, she demonizes the person raising the issue: “I looked at Doug and wondered why he would choose this moment to be so cruel—in the name of being helpful,” when I had confronted her at the hospital.

As I mentioned in my statement earlier on about “the question of validity,” I would suggest that Karen is here demonstrating a severe lack of any interest in authentic truthfulness through her supposed argument by her evident refusal to do more than entertain for a split second the possible value of my position about confronting her when it turned out that so much was at stake, that the “cruelty” she was feeling then and since was much more about herself than me (although not exclusively). In the hope for a greaterly-useful dialectic, it is wise to appreciate that the other side’s position should at least be sensibly analyzed for possible confirmation, but this would mean that the painful feelings provoked by the issues seemingly most at stake in the argument, would have to be tolerated more inside. Neither in referencing her original assessment nor in commenting on it now does Karen even note the possibility that any of her big feelings either recounted or implied could itself be an issue or a symptom, perhaps most markedly in that she never once considers how her capacity for accurate self-reflection about her part in the “scream” incident, not to mention that part itself, might have been seriously contaminated by her own, admitted, pending “emotional breakdown from all the unprocessed grief” which consequentially soon followed upon Michael’s death.

Political psychologist Dunlap (2008) says that one of the main issues any new politics must be concerned with is “emotional impulsivity,” which he says is the opposite of the ability to tolerate “healthy shame” (p. 45). When a person only defensively reacts to the spontaneous provocation of badly distorted, toxic shame, access to the valuable experience of what could be considered integrally-appropriate, healthy shame is blocked. But, when one engages in the effort of purposefully “Attending to this [healthy] shame,” Dunlap says, rather than merely reacting automatically to feeling bad emotions, it “is likely to intensify the experience of the future” quite auspiciously in contrast to being endlessly mired in internally toxic moods, such that there will be a marvelously empowering, “transforming effect” on one’s “political identity” (p. 45) in auspicious consequential result.

Karen’s apparent lack of interest in looking for her own healthy shame in the face of dealing with herself and others around big toxic feelings, as also her not recognizing any theoretical need to fully face the shadow for herself and generally, indicate that she has not given the interpretation I was advancing 15 years ago or today, about the ubiquitous need for gay-centered inner work, any meaningful weight. But I do her no doubt a disservice if I take her impulsivity too one-sidedly myself. Another way to look at the situation is that she is actually VERY INTERESTED in the other side to her position! Perhaps, in truth, she has become so involved in this contentious matter because of highly mixed motives; in that sense, maybe she has just missed having good enough therapy to help do more than collude with her own ill-intentioned defenses in that involvement. Her extended brooding over the unresolved encounter with me suggests that never has anyone helped her work through her own thereso-vigorously-provoked, Nietzschean-type ressentiment of that enchaining effect which I bet is so common to the tamed billions today. She simply got unfairly yelled at, that’s all there is to it, and she’s still righteously mad about it. Such a self-centered and heretofore secretive attitude suggestively indicates to me that she is lustily and shamedly projecting onto me a very big negative transference, that is, a powerful and conflicted emotional meaningfulness associated with a key figure of the developmental past, usually a parent or the childhood shadow-self. And just as a client would in fair justice expect a competent therapist to appreciate and work with such a transferential projection as the relief-seeking impulse of someone who had been very badly traumatized, no doubt as a community we need courageous folks to be able to constructively recognize and carefully manage such powerful projective transferences that may be relevantly going on in public as a very influential way to model moving through some really awful pain badly ensconced homophobically in all of us. And just as a good therapist would eventually confront the transference and insist at some point that the need for angry attacks is sourced in unresolved childhood hurt, pain and shame, and must no longer be misused to destroy gay love, so too effectively-psychological gay community activists must stand up to interpersonal community demonizing irresponsibly unleashed due to some homosexual people’s fierce unconscious defenses and most problematic feelings, and suggest that, for example in Karen’s case, it is time morally and historically that she grow up emotionally a little more to not only cease and desist from nastily spoiling Michael’s memory and his lustful yearning for a more gay-centered life and death any further, but that, as a supposed community leader of some sort, she attemptedly model realistic forms of better managing her own primal hurt, toxic shame and infantile aggression than the lamentable job she has been doing so far, not just in order to stop viciously projecting her exploitative shadow business reactionarily, but mostly so that she can thereby hopefully find a better hint of truer lesbian love in her own satisfactional life, such that the deeply enlightening and reformational consequences sure to valuably result can then more equitably inform her subsequent writing and public speaking, rather than some awful deficit in regard to the intimate subjective matters I am here touching upon, it seems to me, continuing to abandon her to the badly-compromised moral situation she has malodorously descended into currently, which I believe is one of crude hypocrisy and bad-faith self-righteousness internally rooted psychologically in an unexamined affiliation with her own heterosexist parental complexes.

Karen as the Front for A One-Dimensional Society

We gay-centered psychological activists of the necessary future—which is how I describe those of us trying to promote the kind of awareness and organizing I’m talking about in this blog statement—are poised to more accurately challenge the gay-stunting varieties of what Herbert Marcuse characterizes as the modern mind-prison of thoughtless one-dimensionality nowadays being displayed outrageously by Karen, Don and Mark, as well as this monstrous mechanism of subjective enslavement overall, through vigorously fighting it first-and-foremost where it resides most intractably, in our individual psyches themselves, undertaken by bravely entering into the inner world and persistently encountering there the frozen pain, hurt rage and toxic shame of a smashed gay baby self, whose traumatic horror can then be better feelingly partnered and alchemically transformed embodimentally instead of only defeatedly stagnantly submitted to deadenedly. And then, once we begin gaining such a better-felt grounding in our own internal motivational issues as meaningful same-sex-loving persons, we can realistically start to extend that good individuational work to others and to situations beyond self-reparational therapy, into bigger matters concerning further homosexual realization overall, where fresh gay efforts to publically call “foul” to outrageous and insidious one-dimensionality duplicitously enacted under the guise of gay liberation, will again be met with scapegoating projections ruthlessly aimed at nothing less than total annihilation.

We can try to helpfully view the feared anticipatory prospect of painfully undergoing such victimizational decease, as well as the mean-hearted attempt at inflicting it, symbolically. Karen cannot really destroy me; rather, I am likely feeling or re-anticipating the murderous symbolic assault on my subjective self that gruesomely did take place in my own infancy. Similarly, Karen’s obliterational resentment at me for having hotly confronted her is perhaps about getting revenge for the childhood liquidation of good connection to her own lesbian spirit that she still holds a lot of pain, shame and rage about, and she feels safe enough or hateful enough (or both) about it with me to confusedly rail on as if she were in a bad dream where we are both trying but failing to emancipatorily wake each other up from the agonizing invalidational context of that dominating heterosexist brainwashing she otherwise feels smotheringly trapped compulsively into unceasingly upholding covertly when not more openly.

Understanding that we gay activists are now motivatingly obligated by an historically-rising call to become psychological freedom fighters against gay “fear of the future,” against the repressively homophobic “old ethic,” that destructive “one-dimensionality” of mind and being with its assimilating unconscious heterosexism inside our same-sex-loving selves and in today’s societies, a collective terribleness and primitiveness which must be responsibly better addressed if ultimately everybody and even our planet are to survive—such progressive understanding more knowingly endows our valid gay being and enhanced psychological becoming with a tangibly thrilling meaning and overtly-framed initiatory purpose homosexually, in the intimating face of which it becomes increasingly more difficult to merely defensively run and camouflagingly hide as Karen, Mark and Don have regressively specialized in dishonorably doing.

The so-called “scream,” then, possibly amounts to more than just an incident of personal acting out or working through of terrible old trauma, but may include as well the modicum of a transcendent factor involving the possible gay future, as further suggested by the huge symbolic weight Karen has invested it with, a timely qualitative significance in its own expressive right that I would suggest is, if it is actually present, of the more-embodied sort distillationally rendered through sincerely wrestling with difficult shadow material in a caring gay-appreciative manner. One can ethically allow oneself to self-awarely scream bloody murder at the bad breast Karen-mommy as symbol, after all, because it does feel better to sincerely seek a fully-dimensionalized homosexual aliveness rather than stay one-dimensionally dead about it. Indeed, it is so salutary constitutionally when that essential gay vitality is more so corporeally present, as I can testify from bounteous personal growth experience, that after a certain point in such healing self-recovery, the rejuvenated ground of one’s psychological thought and feeling reciprocally starts singing back a melodiously-moving recital of numinous gay love in a salubriously-tangible intimacy of integrally-encountered reconnection, which marvelously-heartening endorsement is a homosexual person’s natural but likely quite-unfamiliar birthright, the better-encountered awakening of an inner fey conscience that reassuringly says, like the empathic gay mommy we likely never had, and like the attentive gay daddy we always deserved, that it’s OKAY to speak out for a more valuable and daring truth about one’s same-sex-loving being, to yelp at stupidity in others but mostly in oneself, at one-dimensionality, at heterosexism, at bodies shut-down, at meaningful activist discourse mockingly reduced to codependent banality or passive-aggressive hostility, that it is indeed not only morally okay but homosexually and humanly noble to loyally and courageously challenge a worthy gay liberation movement which is now at risk of dangerously losing its way, but which is for the same reason presently at a critical juncture with another possible outcome to this growing crisis of gay political meaning, thus a precarious and delicate, yet possibly precious, point in the relatively primitive development of liberated homosexual personhood which we are here at that may be hard to more proportionately recognize in the present beclouding immediacy of the bustling historical moment, but which future, gayer aeons, if we intelligibly survive the final challenging hour to choose more wisely at this most consequential juncture, will surely queerly thank us for.

Summary Conclusion to My Statement

In this blog statement, I have tried to reply judiciously to some malignant comments made about me by LGBT-community journalist Karen Ocamb when she reported in Frontiers in L.A. on a February 2009 public demonstration I was part of, and more so in her related personal blog commentary on the incident that also aired her unresolved gripes in regard to AIDS activist and acapela singer/gay-icon Michael Callen, whose final illness and death some 15 years before I helped Michael deal with by running a round-the-clock care group for him and of which Karen was a member during the last few months.

In responding to Karen’s dubiously vigorous skepticism about most if not all matters importantly related to me and other concerned gay-centered psychological activists with whom I am associated, I thought to take a few steps back from the Karen drama specifically to clarify why we protestors were there to begin with, demonstrating against the version of Radical Faerie history being presented by longtime community leaders Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson on that February Sunday.

We were perturbed that Don, with Mark’s help, was yet again articulating the manipulative Radical Faerie origin story he has been peddling for some time, a revisionist tale that distortionally ensconces him as preeminent founder with Harry Hay, because this manipulative maneuver unilaterally disappears the important phenomenology of a powerful early Radical Faerie schism in which he played a major historical part by following fellow co-founder Mitch Walker’s pioneering psychological lead of the time, all of which matters have to do with pressing current issues about gay liberation and its better future. Now Don says nothing about this previous close affiliation with Mitch and with Mitch’s ideas or the history involved, so crucial not only to present controversies but to the specific kind of professional and activist person he since then has himself become. And, furthermore, people who look up to Don’s lead, including I’m sure many of his regular readers, then tacitly follow suit into this self-serving badland of dishonest distortions. Such a twisted rewriting of the past, and then its attempted mass concretizing, we protestors were concerned, particularly given Don’s community cachet and consequent access to the main gay newsmagazine in town and to other outlets, would end up committing a terrible disservice to the pathbreaking vision of gay-centered inner work associated with and inaugurated by Mitch’s novel synthesis of gay liberation with Freud/Jung starting in the mid-1970s, which is what he was bringing to Harry and the other founding Faeries from the start. The multi-dimensional account being innovationally and so far uniquely developed by Mitch and interested associates ongoingly as to how same-sex-loving peoples today might progressively better enter into the initiatorily-numinous world of generative homosexual psyche through effectively sought out and modulated shadow descent, undertaken therapeutically to constructively confront the bad consequences of internalized heterosexism thoroughly enough so as to alchemically best gain, within one’s valuably-growing feltness of consolidated self-being, directly enhanced access to the tangibilizingly-present, archetypal “god” of gay-centeredness (an ancient same-sex-loving shamanic idea, actually)–such a forward-thinking, multi-dimensional account cannot be constructively accessed by potentially-interested gay people towards enhanced homosexual individuation if that account is so ignored and/or demonized publically that it then cannot fairly be helpfully held forth or reasonably considered. All serious attempts to enhance gay liberatory ingress to the magnificent storehouse of powerful self-knowledge intrinsically resident to the aboriginal spirit of same-sex love ought to be respectfully recognized and appreciatively considered as the “common property” of our homosexual community, particularly as I believe the gay-centered psychological approach I have been involved in developing and that Don and his associates have ignored and demeaned, amounts to a crowning jewel in the contemporaneous era’s gay liberation efforts to justly renew ancient same-sex-loving wisdom traditions in light of new historic challenges and opportunities. By following that ethical sense of collective fairness, this blog statement has tried to convey a more applicational form of gay-centering inner work than anything Don has yet to espouse, all of what he has had to say, so far, in the end seeming neither terribly gay-centered nor sincerely depth psychological, especially as concerns Don’s reticence to integratively discuss key Jungian concepts, such as the shadow and the soul-figure, most tellingly in regard to himself.

I tried to ideationally highlight the loss to good homosexual progress deleteriously incurred by such a limitational leadership deficiency through herein describing the shadow idea as a formulational tool for constructively personifying the disagreeable darkness cast by the gay ego’s self-defensive light, what amounts to a homosexual individual’s gay moral inferiority as internally felt, and to suggest that a coming epochal “new ethic” is now requiring a committed struggle by same-sex-loving persons to subjectively own the inevitably bigotry-poisoned homosexual shadow as ultimately an inner friend rather than to keep, on the one hand, internally repressing it, while on the other, violently projecting or otherwise meanly acting out, often on other gay people, this distaff psychic content which has virulently been most foully fed by many bigoted centuries of anti-same-sex-loving holocaust.

I also tried my best to give a balanced view of the factual history in question related to the Radical Faeries. To do this, I in part relied on “love” letters now rescued from storage and written many years ago to Mitch Walker by Don Kilhefner when they were intimately organizing together, letters honoring Mitch as a great visionary of the gay movement and of the Radical Faeries as well as the main inspirer for Don to take his own inner development as gay more seriously. I also relied on some political philosopher/psychologist-type writers, in particular Herbert Marcuse, Erich Neumann and Peter Dunlap, to back up my claim that how we “spin” or “doctor” reality can easily become a fascist ploy to dictate that reality and control psyches. Political philosopher Marcuse diagnosed the kind of white-washing or “effective suffocation” engaged in by Don and the like as a form of “one-dimensional” thinking that operates totalitarianism in modern, supposedly “democratic” peoples and times. Jungian analyst Neumann gave me a rubric with which to better understand Karen’s attack on me, to see it as a symptom of “the old ethic” whereby the problem of the personal shadow is misaddressed (or not addressed) by disavowing the “evil within” and instead projecting this disconcerting psychic content onto a scapegoated other (in my case as the recipient of Karen’s hateful attack, then resulting in a fear of retribution from Karen/mommy that I reckon wound up delaying the completion of this blog statement for almost a year). Political psychologist Dunlap provided some authoritative grounding to develop the idea that our age of gay community liberalism will lead us to eventual historical irrelevance if we do not evolve to a new qualitative age of gay “psychological liberalism.”

I did my best to try to own my own violence and to “test for validity” by avoiding merely polarizing with Karen (going so far as to say I have an inner Karen) and also by trying to see the “Michael Callen story,” and the matter of how I “screamed” at her for her unannounced officiating over a death-bed farewell between Michael and his parents, from her point of view. I then proceeded to offer a line-reading of her blog statement and to provide my version of the Michael story, where I maintained that he had already gained sufficient closure with his parents by the end and was aiming towards a more so gay-centered death that at that point intentionally only involved his trusted friends, caregivers and his own encounter with the homosexual numinous. I shared how a close affectionate intimacy between him and me was smelted on his passionate and eroticized desire for a better gay-centering taste of the homosexual eternal in studly form, which then allowed us to work closely together in then almost successfully actualizing all his most dearly-held terminal wishes.

It furthermore concerned me that both Don and Karen, each in his or her own way, in the pertinent matters being explored here ended up being so bothered by the immaturity of others (Karen, for example, climactically shames us protestors as “Perennial Peter Pans”), when neither had lifted much of a finger to say anything substantively positive about what real maturity entails for us same-sex-loving peoples. What about, for example, the possibility of more-advanced sexual growth and affectional healing in the human capacity for gay romantic intimacy as central life-long benefits of persistent gay-centered inner work in ongoingly and enhancingly stoking the homosexual individuation process? But, as perhaps my analysis shows, people like Don and Karen are too caught mentally in their own versions of the gay shadow problem to have much good eros left over. If one wants a better, less meanspirited movement, and world, it seems to me, learning how to discover the particular ways in which a big shadow problem (or internalized homophobia) might be infecting one’s same-sex-loving eros such that one’s effective forward vision can’t really substantively evolve beyond merely a baseline depression or crabbiness, no matter how hard one consciously tries to seem more “on top of it” homosexually, is quite essential for the sake of gay personal progress and for our freedom movement’s more positive evolution. In other words, the personal is most certainly political and vice versa in the best intimately-interrelated manner, procreatively and challengingly, in the case of total gay liberation!

In fact, if we can have learned anything important from Dunlap, Marcuse, and Neumann in regard to the matter of leading the homosexual Good Life, it is that no “objective” gay political problem is truly completely resolvable if it is not first and foremost tackled psychologically, which is to say, subjectively. I cannot any longer just point, and say “J’accuse” to somebody else about being heterosexist (without denying objective evil). In fact, our overall moral and political framework concerning where human problems can be said to be ultimately sourced and where they therefore have to finally be “fixed” must fundamentally change not only for gays but everyone, if we are to have any chance in hell of staving off the hell on earth being presently brought towards us menacingly through mounting, unchecked shadow projections.

For we gay and lesbian folk, the ethical implications of the above comprehensions are indeed powerful. Arbitration of what constitutes a morally-valuable existence can no longer be effectively managed from within the rectitudinous code of a supposedly reputable society long based on heterosexist principles, which is to say the old psychological ethic of projection, denial and scapegoating. The scales of a new kind of moral and factual justice for same-sex-loving folk must be operatively forged from an indigenously-gay values system originating conscientiously through a psychic apparatus that was born to be gay and therefore must learn to operate more consciously, logically and feelingly in a progressively better gay-centered way. The psychic world of homosexual archetypal patterning, through which an inherent same-sex-loving libidinal “intelligence” can help further orient us developmentally, lies I believe in patiently-attentive movement toward better gay actualizational fulfillment if we can but wisely extend our homosexual hand in brother (or sister)-like fashion to openly meet the untamed unconscious interiorly on less repressive and, once and for all, more equal and mutually-regardful, same-sex-loving terms.

Don’s overgrown cry-for-help implicitly present in his persistently pushing a manipulated history that unfairly regales him as preeminent surviving Radical Faerie founder, and Karen’s belated activational revealing of a punitive 15-years-long grudge which I believe is principally sourced in her own undigested infantile hurt-rage, should no doubt serve as illustrative object lessons about there being a great reservoir of unconscious bad feeling still stewing inside all of us homosexual people. Ages of heterosexist hate still resonate infectiously from somewhere deep inside like venomous seepage from a buried toxic spill, even long after we have apparently well-enough managed to better grow into meaningful adult life as proud gay persons in wholesomely self-respecting communities, a corrupting and corroding, secretive pollution within now sabotagingly feeding an often well-camouflaged wish for vitiating gay assimilationism. Better that we more actively face the noxiously self-compromising situation causally now building up historically through persistent oppression’s renewed and more-clever collective attempt at still managing some sort of anti-homosexual genocide in the face of apparent gay-lib success, than keep sticking our queer movement heads in the dissociative sand about this looming basal threat, especially because it is, in the end, only our greater sensual wholeness and estimable interior embodiment as valuably homosexual and as good same-sex-loving persons, it seems to me, that we truly fear in the historic problem vexingly at hand. Learning better how to constructively employ our epoch-making eros to assertively befriend the crushed, lost fey child within us through dedicated inner work guided by a gay-centering appreciation, even as we more overtly wish only to think politically in extravert ways and thus to continue revengefully acting out societal homophobia to contradictorily destroy or otherwise thwart ourselves and one another through defensive repression, toxic shame, historical erasure and character defamation—such a profound gay political reorientational step responsibly follows along that forging same-sex-loving path enlighteningly revealed by the new psychological ethos we have been here looking at, as well as homosexually involving the necessary cultivation of that fresh technology practically needed to effectively use this new moral compass to better reach the gay Good Life, to remuneratively attain a realizational sort of homosexual “philosopher’s stone” that I bet our still-not-fully-freed people most indelibly yearn for in their same-sex-loving heart-of-hearts, and increasingly now must depend upon metaphorically gaining through enhanced subjective prioritization.

Perhaps there is an alchemically sacred and secretly accessed gift in existently being meaningfully same-sex-loving that will decisively help us bountifully undertake as well as more tangibly result from the grand, new, aeonic, gay activist work which I have respectfully attempted to introductorily outline here in this somewhat-extended blog discussion, a pressing rejuvenational effort organizationally which I believe to be quite essential, and not just for our gay selves and freedom movement alone. If we sincerely enter on this most daunting but daring of novel, futuristic endeavors, maybe in its procreatively-unfolding course the genius or divine intelligence of that homosexual giftedness which could enable our better success, will finally be gestationally revealed inspirationally in a more direct truthfulness that marvelously lifts our own gay developmental comprehension and same-sex-loving completion to a startling new order of fresh substantificational significance, qualitative satisfaction and contributive import most so valuationally in needfully pressing regard to the upcoming fate of humanity and the world at large.

Endnotes

[1] Harry Hay, informed by the Marxist concept of validating peoples marginalized by unjust power, developed the at-the-time quite novel idea (simultaneously also pioneered in Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America [1951]) that gay people constituted their own ethnic minority. At last, oppressed homosexuals of that era could begin claiming a culture and a legacy stretching back in historical time as related to a variety of names (e.g., Mattachine; berdache; two spirit; gay; faerie). Mattachines were 13^th Century “fools” who espoused modern notions of romantic love and class revolution. Harry saw parallels between today’s homosexuals and the Mattachines as well as to the Native American berdache or “two spirit” being. Regular meetings of the Society in secret cells brought gay folk together who had been injured by a bigotry and hatred almost inconceivable to many of us today in its blanket severity, beginning the process of individual homosexual healing that was subsequently taken up most focusedly in the rise of gay-affirmative therapy. Harry was learning to be passionately gay-centering before there was even an American gay movement—and therefore of a newer and disturbing kind of political radicalism. One key motif of being a homosexual, of course, is to disturb the status quo. Not so long after his Mattachine Society won an important legal case and became a nation-wide movement, Harry was ejected by his group for being too politically “red” and theoretically radical. But his better reconciliation with history was to come with meeting a child of the hippie movement who was able to appreciate his writings as heralding a new stage in gay liberation even beyond Harry’s own ken.

[2] Indeed, complaints about Harry being imperiously domineering go back decades. In Behind the Mask of the Mattachine (2006), author James Sears quotes fellow activist Jim Kepner referring to “Harry’s dominating spirit” (p. 170), and Sears himself variously characterizes the Harry Hay of the early Mattachine period as possessing an “irascible personality” (p. 162), an “aversion to take into account views contrary to his own” (p. 164), an intimidating “bulldozer personality” (p. 165), a “stubbornness and overbearing nature” which was “alienating” (p. 166), as well as an “imperious Marxist leadership style” (p. 167). C. Todd White, in Pre-Gay L.A. (2009) quotes Dale Jennings, the man who called Harry Hay from jail one spring morning in 1952 to come bail him out on a vice charge that later became the basis of a groundbreaking Mattachine court case, describing Harry as coercively wielding “the imperial self-confidence of the chosen,” and mocking him as “The Great Man” (p. 24). I should also mention that I also recall having read somewhere that Harry’s problematic personality had gotten him such animosity from other members of the early Mattachine organizing group that he was eventually reprimanded by them and wound up promising to take better responsibility for this issue in the future, but so far I have not located the source of this recollection. I will continue looking, however, and hopefully I will uncover the appropriate material by which I will then be able to adjust the last part of this note.

[3] The reader may notice in going along that I repeatedly refer to several political theorists of a psychological bent in my analysis to help clarify my argument about the problem of how mass-mindedness in all its manifestations shapes and is also shaped by our unfinished psychologies in pervasive and insidious ways that defensively maintain the status quo of unjust power relations collectively in our society and individually in the inner workings of our complexes and object relations. And while a vast literature exists that concerns a certain aspect of this dilemma of how “social discourse” oppresses all bodies through invisible narratives of “knowledge” and “power”—I am thinking here of that entire domain of ideation called variously “social construction,” “postmodernism” or “deconstruction,” of whom critical theorist Michael Foucault is an influential spokesperson (see, for example, Foucault, 1963/1972, 1966/1970, 1977, 1976/1980)—I have largely avoided referring to this literature, in part due to its anti-psychological bent sourced in an anti-humanism and anti-transpersonal orientation that is derived from a post-Marxist-materialist suspicion of all things “essential.” (This is not to say that the postmodern orientation, as well as its attendant questioning of what we might here call a kind of “naïve essentialism,” namely that regressive thought-form utilized by the right wing in the USA, is invalid, especially if appreciated as a means to diagnose unjust power discourses in invisible social systems, as long as this “social constructionism” does not collude with unanalyzed internalized homophobia to discount the validity of numinous gay identity/eros as such). It is for this reason that I have embraced the terms “gay,” “lesbian,” “homosexual” and “same-sex-loving” in this discussion in a judiciously-applied transhistorical sense. It is also due to this reason that I have turned for political framing of my discussion not to postmodernism but instead to a few select voices who have maintained an ability to value depth psychology while looking at the ways in which our oppressed personal psychologies lead to oppression in the political realm and vice versa. I have a particular fondness for voices from what is loosely termed the “Frankfurt School of Philosophical Thought,” which arose from the Institute of Social Research in Germany in 1923, then relocated to California in 1941. One of the major figures to emerge from this line of thought that sought to politicize philosophy and psychology is Herbert Marcuse, whose Eros And Civilization (1955) offers a re-reading of Freudian drive theory through a Marxist political lens (And if read carefully, with an appreciative gay-centering sensibility, his book can be seen as a major celebration of twinship homosexual love as providing the psychological antidote to a society become crazed by unchecked capitalistic violence). His One-Dimensional Man (1964) is said to have laid out a theoretical foundation for the New Left and student movements of the later 1960s. From another direction, Erich Neumann’s work, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1969), if not influenced by the Frankfurt School implicitly, seems to be the one Jungian effort of that period which is expressly concerned with unjust power relations and how they maintain and arise from internal fascist states of mind (perhaps this has something to do with Neumann being Jewish and his writing his book in Israel in the aftermath of WWII). Peter Dunlap (2008) is a new figure to arrive on the scene and is discussed in this blog statement due to the elegant way he builds on both Jung and Frankfurt School thinkers (among others, including philosopher Ken Wilbur) to offer the first comprehensive statement on the growing need for all political effort to become quite overtly psychological if we are to finally emerge from a relatively primitive, increasingly problematic state of human mental life. There are a few additional voices I might have included, such as Erich Fromm, also of the Frankfurt School, whose Escape from Freedom (1941), offers an existential analysis as to why human beings fear their own agency and retreat to fascist forms of group collectivity, but I thought that the basic political thought-forms I was interested in were included sufficiently in Marcuse, Neumann and Dunlap, at least in this blog discussion’s preliminary form, to not need to be more exhaustively referenced. It might have also been interesting to quote from the masters themselves, such as Freud, Marx, Jung and Nietzsche, each of whom have important things to say about how alienation from our essential psychology is a political problem.

[4] I have myself met and talked to Don on several occasions, by the way, but the only time I ever had a substantial conversation with him was when I was interviewing for therapists in 1989. I thought he was great at dream interpreting. I told him about a dream of travelling to Australia with my mother and he said that I had to go into the underworld to wrestle with my mother complex—I don’t recall him being that eloquent, exactly. Compared to Mitch, though, who I wound up with as my first serious therapist, I found Don too dry in his thinking and, according to my classist inner kids, too bourgeois—not nearly shamanic, or as in Mitch’s case, rabbinic, enough. I did, however, appreciate that he seemed to be attempting a gay-centered Jungian approach, not realizing at the time that he had learned about this from Mitch.

[5] Here is one small example of what Don does with his “I started the Radical Faeries with Harry Hay” charade. At the recent “faeposium 2: A Radical Faerie Conference, Urban Fathering, and Performance Event,” put on by a host of Faerie organizations and RFD Magazine during the weekend of October 2-4, 2009 in San Francisco, Don gave a workshop entitled “The First Radical Faerie Gathering: The Vision,” the blurb for which went this way: “In this workshop, Don will talk about the co-organizing with Harry Hay of the first Radical Faerie gathering in the Sonora desert of Arizona over Labor Day weekend in 1979. He will also speak about Harry and Don’s joint vision for the Radical Faeries and explore with the participants of the workshop where we are now and the need for another national fathering of Radical Faeries.”

[6] In order to focus my statement on the most pertinent of Karen’s accusations in light of the quite-substantial space I feel is required for even that more-limited task, I will defer on replying to some of the specific issues related to Mark Thompson she here raises, about which in a future extension of this blog statement I may delve into more specifically than to point out at this time how awful Karen makes her opponents seem in this area as everywhere else, and instead for now I will refer the interested reader to Wendell Jones’ statements in this same blog, which more so address matters concerning Mark and his break from the rest of us.

[7] Don uses the fact that, in the breakdown of organizing functions arranged by the founding Faerie group, he took on managing many of the principal practical efforts in close consultative league with Harry (which is a big reason he had been invited to join), in contrast to those functions taken up more specifically by Mitch which did not involve Don, to then distortionally argue that Mitch “didn’t play as significant a role,” a statement which badly trivializes the conglomerate and consensual depth of the original activist formation that grew up around Harry and Mitch’s procreational bond as I have come to understand this development, while it aggrandizes himself and the importance of his practical management functions.

[8] Essentialist models of gay development formulated after the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 tell us gayness is a living process that amounts to becoming increasingly more at home with being gay. What a simple concept, but nonetheless a challenging endeavor only now just being studied effectively. Indeed, at first, growing up with our heterosexist parents and society, gayness seems at least in some ways horribly abnormal. This ingrained pathologizing tendency starts to mellow out the more one gets “turned on” by those of the same sex and finds increasing support in the gay world. What was seen as sick becomes what one quite normally craves. The desire for gay sex and romance becomes so mesmerizingly addictive that the person slowly but surely gives up a lot of identification with the heterosexual world, now viewed as oppressive, stultifying, even itself stupified. Then, after usually some great struggle, maybe including the loss of relations with parents and friends, a person, in an act of great heroism still poorly understood, bravely “comes out” first to self, then to others. The developing gay personality goes through a profound death-and-rebirth metamorphosis of being and becoming, perhaps the greatest sort of transformation anyone can undergo. Homosexual love is chosen over heterosexism. Coming out is an act of gay self-realization and personal revolution, if perhaps the first stage. Nothing less than a kind of overall political revolution is what is at stake here, because without a profound shift of power to the subjectivity of the individual, as I will argue below, we human beings will not be able to survive as a species. The difference between this progressive interiorizing worldview and the violent Marxist promulgations of the past is that this vernal formulation suggests that the new terrain of change is within each individual MIND itself, in overthrowing the false gods of heterosexism in the inner world of one’s “object relations,” which is a psychoanalytic way of picturing inner psychodynamics (It should be mentioned that the gay “essentialist” model being put forward here is currently contested by an attitude developed and espoused in the academy called postmodern “social constructionism,” but I will not get into that debate here).

[9] The reader may wonder why I reference Nietzsche in such close association with the tradition of more overt gay-centered thought. My doctoral dissertation (Sadownick, 2006) investigated how it was reasonable to see Nietzsche as a gay man and to regard his eccentric masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as well as various of his other efforts, as pre-gay-liberation, pre-psychoanalytical anticipations of what this discussion is calling “gay-centered inner work,” with the “overman” symbolic of an intrapsychic archetypal homosexual “voice” or gay self-realizational “Greater Personality,” what Mitch Walker would eventually call “Uranian Eros.” (For an interesting analysis comparing Nietzsche’s homoeroticism to that of Whitman, see Stavrou, 1964).

[10] I would like to additionally augment my analysis at this juncture by pointing out that in his classic text, The One-Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse, a leading proponent of the Frankfurt School, the first sustained group effort to bring a revolutionary social change ethos to Freudian psychoanalysis, provides a useful series of metaphors to help us understand how political and destructive the actions of Don, Mark and Karen are not just to our own community but to society at large. Marcuse’s conceptualizations have helped me personally explain to colleagues in the gay community and at my work place, Antioch University, why my friends and I decided to demonstrate against, of all people, Don and Mark, individuals who, to untrained eyes, seem to be doing good gay community work. To this end, it can help that Marcuse points an indicting finger at what he calls the “one-dimensional man,” a figure who is so overcome by paralysis, or what we might call “toxic shame,” that he or she cannot tolerate intellectual or any other self-criticism of any true depth, and who, by his or her consequent “alienation” (p. 9) from the “inner dimension of the mind” (p. 10), overturns the two basic premises of life, “the judgment that human life is worth living,” and that society should “exist for the amelioration of human life” (p. x). Marcuse could well have been talking about Don, Mark and Karen when he says that one-dimensional man promotes “one-dimensional thought and behavior” (p. 12, his italics) and that “the new mode of thought” (p. 13) which is not thought at all but “publicity” (p.12) provides nothing to the consumer but “a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood” (p. 12). This is the form totalitarianism takes in modern democratic times. Here “ideas, aspirations, and objectives” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 12) that challenge the “established universe of discourse and action” (p. 12) are “either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe” (p. 12) not through physical terror but through a fear of loosing membership in the social collective such that “mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe” (p. 18).

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