Wendell Jones' Response to Karen Ocamb - Part II

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Response to Karen Ocamb — Part II

by Wendell Jones

Los Angeles gay-media journalist Karen Ocamb posted a substantial statement on her blog in February 2009 called Who's History? My Curious Encounter with the Radical Faeries (see the link in this blog’s March 2009 Archive), in which she questioned my call to protest a public presentation by notable L.A. gay community figures Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson about the Radical Faerie movement at the One National Gay and Lesbian Archives that took place on February 15, 2009. In Part I of my response to her post, written last year, I wrote about important historical information that I wished I could have included in my original call to protest but which was neglected due to the short time span I had to prepare the initial statement. In this second part, I would like to rectify and clarify at least some of the numerous historical inaccuracies present throughout Karen’s quite vicious commentary, as well as offer reasoned criticisms of the main points she attempts to make.

Psychological Responsibility and the Shadow

Before addressing specific areas of her statement, I would like to discuss the overall attitude she presents, exemplified by the sarcastic and hostile way that she references the Jungian concept of the psychological shadow, especially when she says, talking about Mitch Walker, one of the co-founders of the Radical Faeries, “And what gives him—and his followers—the right to tell me about my goddamn ‘shadow’ when I have not asked for his ‘help,’ thank you very much.” First of all, Mitch, as far as I know, has never told Karen anything about her shadow, since they don’t even know each other personally in the slightest, as Karen admits earlier in her rant. What he has done, in his writings, public appearances and individual interactions during the twenty years I have known him, has been to consistently articulate the key importance for all of us to honestly and authentically deal with our shadows, an overall ethical position around psychological responsibility that I discussed at the beginning of Part I.

Right now, I’d like to offer a more specific understanding of the shadow as that part of each person’s unconscious mind which is comprised of the most shameful and socially unacceptable feelings, fantasies and urges, including animal aggression, murderous rage, rapist impulses, all the raw primal emotions as well as traumatic anguishes of early childhood which, due to our emotionally-dysfunctional culture, never get healthfully integrated into the adult personality. As Mitch has explained in his recent book, Gay Liberation at a Psychological Crossroads (2009), the shadow is probably the most serious problem facing gay people and all of humanity today, because when it is not consciously confronted and wrestled with, it has a tendency to make us unintentionally act out or defensively behave destructively in passive-aggressive and/or overtly violent ways in the world with usually awful results now accumulating to a possibly ghastly climax.

It could well be quite reasonably argued that humanity’s persistent overall inability to deal with the psychological shadow is why there is today horrific damage being inflicted on the planetary environment, why people murder each other on a vast scale, why they treat themselves and their closest so cruelly through domestic violence, unsafe sex, alcoholism, etc. The point I wish to emphasize is that we all have a shadow, and it is imperative for the future of the gay community and everyone that each of us learn to deal with it better. But at the same time, this turns out to be an incredibly difficult task, because the shadow by definition is comprised of those aspects of ourselves that we least want to see, leading to remarkable degrees of defensiveness, evasion, projection and so on. Karen enacts a classically defensive attitude towards the problem of the shadow when she claims to have been violated by Mitch’s fantasied interest in her shadow. This is clearly her own idea since she’s never even related with him, and as far as I am aware, Mitch has never discussed Karen or her particular shadow in any manner that could have “gotten back to her” in realistic justification of her claim of outrage. As I proceed in this discussion, I will highlight other areas where it seems to me that Karen fundamentally fails to grasp the basic meaning of the shadow idea, and of subjectivity as psychological experience more generally, and instead unselfreflectively acts out problems of her own personal psychology.

Another simple example of such comprehensional failure is suggested by the start of her statement, where she says, “I don’t do gossip,” and then proceeds to unload massive amounts of what I can only think is best described as indeed “gossip,” or intimate matters about others she knows or has heard about, as she goes into describing her highly subjective memory of quite dishy personal interactions between her and my longtime associate Doug Sadownick that took place 15 years ago, detailed below, as well as describing hearsay from other equally-loaded community events that she herself did not attend, also discussed below. Furthermore, she makes various bald claims throughout her piece that are not at all supported by any reasonable evidence or logic. For example, she writes that in his journalistic days, Doug was “skewing or creating details to enhance a story which were not facts I witnessed or quotes I heard when covering the exact same event,” but she does not offer a single specific example of the purported misbehavior to support such a serious and otherwise possibly-defamatory critique of Doug’s professionalism. The piquant irony in this instance, as I hope to show more so below, is that this “skewing or creating details” is exactly what Karen herself does in her own blog statement, thereby again suggesting the reasonable conclusion that it is she who is massively projecting or defensively imputing her own “skewing” shadow to Doug and the other victims of her defamatory attack.

Caring for Michael Callen in a More Gay Way

Karen reports that she had facilitated a “miraculous reconciliation” between Michael Callen, a prominent AIDS activist during the late 80s and early 90s, and his biological family in the hours just before he died, and that Doug, who was also taking care of him but wasn’t there at the time, then viciously screamed at her when she later told him about it, unfairly accusing her of violating Michael's very being, such that she felt deeply wronged and resentfully hurt. She makes it seem in her account as if Doug didn’t want Michael to have anything to do with Michael’s family, as if Doug was some kind of Machiavellian or even crazy person cruelly trying to selfishly dominate his friend’s dying experience in order to keep him exploitationally apart from his caring kinfolk.

Since Doug and I have been good friends for many years, I asked him about Karen’s account. Doug explained that during the last two years before Michael’s death, he was the central person managing Michael’s end-of-life situation and its important particulars. Karen’s version differs significantly, for example when she says that all interaction with Michael’s family was turned over to her to manage “since I could speak heterosexual” while Doug was disengaged or even hostile about it. She even claims credit for coordinating a big family visit a month before Michael died, but Doug has assured me that he was actually the organizer and expeditor of this final in-person meeting, and that he had bent over backwards to make Michael’s parents and brother comfortable, even taking them out to dinner after seeing the bed-ridden Michael. In fact, Doug recently showed me letters he still has from both Michael’s mother and brother effusively expressing their gratitude to Doug for his kindness toward them. As I understand it, after the visit Michael thanked Doug for handling it but specifically told him that he did not need to deal with his family again, especially because he wanted to die in a gay way in a more so gay space while his family, on top of being a typically-breederistic organization ideologically as well as in fact, was made up of virulently anti-gay conservative Christians not fundamentally swayed either by Michael’s prior gay community fame, musical art and national PWA work or the recent hospital visit, and this in particular regard to Michael’s father, where there was still substantial unresolved homophobia of a most-vigorously ugly and well-supported sort. It is estimably realistic to see that Michael may very well have recognized that as he got closer to the end he would be at his weakest, highly medicated, and perhaps unable to emotionally protect himself from his reactionary family’s intensely selfish agendas. As it did in fact turn out, Karen’s so-called familial “miraculous reconciliation” was a telephone conversation which she orchestrated at the very end when Michael was indeed at his most vulnerable, and which did expressly oppose his dying wishes, at least as Doug understood them after many long months of highly intimate relating with Michael around these very issues. Thus, it seems quite reasonable that after Michael died, Doug would have vigorously confronted Karen about what she had done, about how she herself may have actually been exploiting Michael cruelly to act out her own problematic feelings around being somehow abandoned by her own parents. Karen admits that Doug’s challenge carried enough weight that she was forced to consider this possibility and asked the question: “did I facilitate the reconciliation between Michael and his family because of my own family issues?”

This is a good start, and exactly the right way to begin exploring possible shadow business. But then Karen next writes, “The answer was no. Michael was my friend and this was always about him.” Although it may in fact be true that Karen made very real sacrifices to help Michael to the best of her ability, this two-bit line of ill-reasoning shows off her woeful lack of psychological self-awareness. Any person with the least understanding of the concept of the shadow, by no means an arcane formulation, would recognize that any pat “no” to this open-ended type of subjective question reveals a foundational ignorance about it at best, and likely a violent defensiveness behind that! How could Karen’s family issues not be subjectively implicated emotively in such a profoundly evocative moment as the end of a person’s life she is involvingly caught up in caring for? Is she some sort of saint or blessed angel as pure as driven snow? How could any of us, after exhausting days of terminal care for a sensitive and intelligent young friend dying an excruciating and unfair death from the ugly complications of ravaging AIDS, not be vulnerably provoked into associated personal psychological business undoubtedly related (because it always is) to early developmental issues, particularly in terms of charged childhood stuff when still-homophobic but needy and fiercely manipulative parents are now suddenly calling with last-minute maneuvers? While Karen is easily accusing Doug of being cruel in the name of being helpful, she doesn’t appear to at all appreciate that she may very well be ironically describing her own otherwise hidden, unconscious shadow machinations. What if Doug is right, which is quite equitable to consider due to his many long months of intimate involvement in the situation when contrasted to Karen’s much more limited participation? What if Michael really didn’t want to have to deal with his parents again, particularly as he weakly lay at the end stage of his long expiration?

This difficult situation around Michael’s final experiences may in fact be a “textbook” illustration as to how serious the challenging problem of psychological projection of personal shadow material is, a two-faced situation in which Karen would be, through an internal defensive maneuver, deflecting responsibility for her own violent predations toward Michael by instead feeling as if that violence was coming from Doug to her, and then subsequently demonizing him in a scapegoating reaction so strongly that she held a bitter grudge about it deeply for many years without ever even attempting to address it with him as she was outwardly ongoingly friendly. Karen writes that she was “estranged” from Doug after Michael’s death, but according to Doug, they actually had many interactions over the years since, in which Karen never alluded in the slightest to any of these crucial matters. Still, Doug became more aware through time that there was a problem in his relationship to Karen, and I know that he wanted to try to resolve it with her because he asked me about doing so more than once, though I don’t think he ever attempted very hard to really try anything. Doug has an anxious shadow, too, of course, which perhaps got in the way of his more directly raising his concerns with Karen during their years of interaction after Michael’s death. He told me that he felt intimidated by her seemingly convivial yet covertly limitational handling of him. It’s also reasonable to suspect that he did not trust that Karen was in any realistic way working on her own psychological issues so as to be able to take better responsibility for them while matters about Michael and Doug were addressed with her, so it’s understandable that he would feel intimidated by trying to approach her about it.

But what about Karen’s statement that Doug “screamed” at her? He has told me that he doesn’t remember actually screaming, but acknowledges that he strongly disputed her actions when she told him what had happened with the Michael familial “reconciliation.” Was it necessary for him to do that right after Michael’s death? I’d like to answer this question by discussing the critical, if somewhat unpopular, importance of gay-centeredness as an attitude, value and perspective, which I believe Doug was speaking for in that angry moment with Karen, a value which evidently was highly important to Michael Callen as well.

“Reconciling” with Our Families, or Not

I think it is crucial to explore here some of the extraordinarily complex issues involved in how gay people relate to their heterosexual parents and the whole institution of the biological family. Karen talks in terms of “reconciling” gay and lesbian folk to our families, but what does such rapprochement actually entail, especially if we consider the question from a gay-centered stance? Let’s take, for example, the tragic problem of a gay person fated to die too young, as I saw many times in my early work in ACT-UP, for the most part with unresolved conflicts involving family members, often hidden or unconscious. And while the experience of sharing one’s dying process with the family can possibly offer a last chance for honest communication and perhaps even reparations, apologies or love of a healing nature, if instead family members harbor homophobic attitudes and feelings, even if unacknowledged, the dying gay person will experience a terrible re-traumatization from them when he or she is at a most vulnerable place.

I know from my own history how many variations on this unfair dynamic of bigotry between suffering gay persons and their kin there can be. When my good friend Wade was at the end of his ferocious struggle with AIDS, his long-absent father suddenly arrived and began verbally spewing hatred in Wade’s hospital room about how disgusted he was to see me and other gay men holding his son’s hand and caring for the one he claimed to love so much. Wade’s brother, a heterosexual man, was there and immediately stepped in to confront their father, fortunately, telling him that this was not a loving way to act and if he did not stop he would be asked to leave. It may be impossible for any gay person to resolve all of a lifetime’s homophobically-inflicted familial trauma when at death’s door, but it is possible to create a reasonably respectful dialogue that can allow for powerfully fresh expressions of renewal, love and support. However, this is an impossible task if a gay person’s family members, like Wade’s, claim to love their child but continue to act out or tolerate rejecting condemnation of their child’s gay essence. As Doug and others have told me, Michael’s right-wing parents had a long and unrepentant history of being cruelly homophobic to him and to gays generally, so I could easily understand why Michael did not want them involved at the end, and why Doug could have yelled at Karen after he discovered what she had done. Also, it is not so peculiar, in my experience, for people who share feelings of unusual closeness and intimacy when taking care of dying friends to feel abandoned or alone after the death finally occurs, or to become angry over conflicts that develop in the end. Doug has told me he regrets that any disagreements from that time were not fully discussed. Karen obviously felt quite hurt and angry with Doug, but I think she was wrong to assume he acted primarily out of his own selfish and violent personal agendas, and doubly wrong to behave dishonestly with him for all those years after Michael’s death on such a mistakenly-assumptive basis. It seems much more likely that in her big reaction, Karen was projecting her own bad-faith act of domination onto Doug to get retribution heaped on him rather than, more justifiably, on herself, and that she assumed, conveniently and incorrectly, that if she ever discussed her feelings with Doug he would not only take no adequate responsibility for his own shadow issues but instead would only attack her more viciously.

The End of My Friendship with Mark Thompson

Karen’s initial problems with Doug were only compounded when Mark Thompson apparently much later told her about an incident in 1997 in which Doug, myself and other prior friends of Mark’s confronted Mark at a bookstore reading he gave for his newly published volume, Gay Body. She writes that “the small group also showed up at Skylight Books in Silver Lake during Mark's reading and shouted ‘shadow’ questions that left Mark so frightened, he and Malcolm were hastily snuck out the back by Betty Berzon and Terry DeCrescenzo.”

In order to accurately comprehend this bookstore incident, it is critical to first appreciate that Doug and I had both been long-term close friends with Mark. We had all done serious gay-centered inner work together for many years and had been meeting monthly in a very intimate, psychologically oriented Radical Faerie circle. Doug and myself, as well as Mitch Walker, had even been personally thanked at the beginning of Mark’s new book for our help and support in its preparation, and we respected him as an important community leader. All of us had been emotionally close as well as tightly allied in gay organizing and in our commitment to gay-centered inner work as a personal practice and a political act of the highest order.

Karen never discusses why Mark was asked several challenging questions about his shadow at his reading. Instead, she insinuates that we were simply harassing him. To offer a different view, let me explain that I was directly involved in the events which led up to the bookstore confrontation, and which I would now like to recount. A crisis had occurred in my friendship with Mark a few months before the Skylight incident, wherein the possibility had arisen that Mark had presided over and engaged in dangerous incidents of unsafe sex at encounter workshops he ran that could have resulted in the spread of HIV, and he was refusing to meaningfully consider that possibility. I attended some of these workshops and had met for nearly two years with Mark in a Radical Faerie Circle that was organized after the previous local Circle split up (as I described in Part I), and I trusted Mark enough at that time to have invited friends to also participate in his workshops.

I first became aware of a possible problem when a mutual friend of mine and Mark’s, who had initially invited Mark to present local public encounter workshops, told me he was concerned he might have been infected by Mark with HIV at one of these events that we both had participated in. He pointed out how he believed his infection was as much his fault as that of anyone who infected him because we are all responsible for safe sex, and we can’t simply blame others for our own failures, but he was nevertheless distraught and agonizing over when exactly he had seroconverted. He was afraid Mark would end their friendship if he broached such a difficult issue with him.

I insisted that his fear of such retaliation by Mark was not realistic, for Mark was our trusted associate and was quite committed to examining any of his own unconscious motivations that might possibly have led to hurting others. I had my friend carefully go over his sexual history and list out the exact dates of his HIV tests, which he had been doing regularly for some time. It turned out that he had heretofore consistently tested negative and had had no questionable sexual encounters he could recall more recently with anyone except Mark. Since this problem related to public workshops we both had attended and could impact further such events, I insisted my friend had an obligation to discuss with Mark the possibility that Mark had infected him. I again assured him that Mark was an ethical leader who could ultimately be trusted to support him in talking about this uncomfortable matter and would in fact want to know this information.

I was wrong. Although Mark agreed to an initial discussion, when my friend was not satisfied and wanted to process his concerns more fully with him, Mark abruptly cut off any and all further communication about the matter. I was shocked. I then talked to Mark directly, begging him to consider that this coldly-rejecting behavior was likely not the best way to handle the problem. Mark refused to get into the issue anymore, other than to derisively dismiss the infected person, our long-time mutual friend and co-sponsor of his workshops, as a “borderline personality” whom I should just ignore. After that encounter with me, he then also proceeded to sever contact with the entire group of psychological Radical Faeries he had been meeting with for years, particularly his close activist friends who were trying by that point to reason with him to just slow down and better consider the aroused psychology behind what he was doing. Still, I clung to my belief that Mark was a good friend who would ultimately work through these difficulties with those of us comrades who truly cared about him, so I wrote him and called, trying to forestall his evident ending of what I’d been led to feel was a very special friendship, but to no avail.

If I was not concerned that Mark as a public figure might continue to give workshops that could be potentially unsafe, I would still have felt deeply pained by his rejecting behavior, to be sure, but this matter of Mark’s betrayal would have seemed not so much of an important community issue to me. Yet he did persist in presenting himself openly as an expert S.M. teacher in various settings such as the Radical Faerie off-shoot Black Leather Wings and in smaller groups, and he could now use his most recent book Gay Body, with my minor implicit imprimatur by virtue of his grateful acknowledgement of me by name (along with a few others) at the book’s start, as further proof of his fitness to be such a leader. I was seriously concerned because of my historical involvement that due to the power now being invested in Mark, if he did not critically evaluate his supposed ethical standards, subsequent questionable actions could potentially jeopardize the safety of many others, as well as himself, such that it would culpably entail me even in a modest fashion if I did not speak and/or behave in some contrary manner. My point in attempting to meet my own standard of integrity about this challenging situation back then was and indeed still is that if Mark could not more fully discuss important hurt feelings and related concerns involving his encounter group events and a sincerely thoughtful participant, and if he refused to recognize a moral duty to forthcomingly address possible mistakes he may have made in relation thereto, then he could easily wind up repeating feasibly irresponsible actions. Worst of all for myself, as someone who had participated in and helped promote Mark’s work and reputation, as I just mentioned, I did indeed feel a strong degree of ethical culpability in this problematic matter that would be compounded if I did not try to more directly challenge Mark about what seemed like his strikingly hypocritical position.

When I subsequently confronted Mark at Skylight Books with other friends, it was because Mark had now completely isolated himself from his quickly-former associates, and that was the only place we could see him. At the book reading, I purposely did not bring up the matter of unsafe sex because, at the time, I imagined Mark could become so publicly exposed thereby that he would feel too trapped in his toxic shame to functionally communicate with his former friends. Also, I was concerned about the privacy of the other friend he could have infected. I still vainly hoped that if what seemed like terribly unconscious behavior was pointed out in a sensitively crafted “right way,” Mark could better work with his own traumatic feelings to then act more ethically.

What ensued at the bookstore didn’t take much to bring about, because many people there, including the few I came with, as well as what turned out to be various of Mark’s associates and allies, were full of explosive feelings. As Mark was reading, ex-friend Chris Kilbourne asked him about the shadow a couple times. After all, the subtitle of his book, “Journey through Shadow to Self,” begged for such a query, when Mark, in his presentation, was assiduously avoiding anything that smacked of his own darkness, having chosen to read some of the most innocuously ingratiating passages in the book. Mark did not respond. Then, a spirited argument arose, with Mark’s partner, Malcolm Boyd, yelling at us first to shut up as more of Mark’s former friends broached questions about the shadow, while Terry DeCrescenzo and Betty Berzon were initially hostile, but then began asking what we meant by what we were trying to say, with several of us attempting to answer them. Although there were clearly large amounts of hostility and infantile hurt-rage erupting in the room, the confrontation remained fairly civilized albeit boisterous, and Mark was never prevented from speaking up or continuing his presentation, but he certainly did his best to appear victimized, as if his delicate person was way too tender and fragile to hold up under the supposedly-terrible assault there being inflicted.

Karen writes in her blog that Mark, and also Harry Hay, had even gone so far as to suggest to her about difficult people such as I was becoming, that if she was ever to publicly write about this issue, the group of us who had confronted Mark at Skylight Books would then violently “come after me” and even worse, they said, “They'll come after your dogs.” It seems uncharacteristic for Harry to utter such a blatant scurrility, but even if he did, I can say with confidence, personally knowing all of the accused, that there isn’t a single individual who would in some way even imagine it, much less want to hurt or kidnap anyone’s dog. Does Karen seriously believe that any of us are likely to advocate or act out that stupid level of crude physical violence? Even if this was only meant rhetorically, it would still constitute a powerful shadow projection nonetheless, since those here being ridiculed (and/or exposed) are ones who typically cup spiders in the house and set them free outside, not vile torturers of innocent pets, nor any other sort of diseased revenge seeker.

I should also mention that, although Mark evidently claimed to Karen he was so frightened at the book reading that he had to be hastily snuck out the back door, I could see how Mark’s seemingly terrified demeanor disappeared completely when he spoke to me privately at the event just before he did leave. He smiled at me pleasantly and wished me well and didn’t act afraid at all. As I saw with my own eyes, this stance then dramatically changed at once when he then turned back to his allies whom he had asked to protect him, whereupon he again appeared as a scared, harassed victim. Could it be that Mark was actually worried about being exposed as a possibly failed S.M. master presenting questionable workshops? If so, then it could be that he behaved manipulatively in the bookshop situation and afterward when recounting it to others over the years (and now to Karen) because he did not want anyone who didn’t already know to find out a perhaps ruinously-humiliating truth.

If Karen had ever taken the time to ask Doug, myself or the several others who had taken up what we felt was a moderately and principled confrontational position at Mark’s public book reading, all of whom still live locally and can easily be reached, she would have heard a deeply different account than the one Mark (and allies) must have described to her. It’s actually very odd that it never seems to have occurred to Karen that there might even be a legitimate reason for anyone to confront Mark. Why would a group of close friends who had worked together for many years suddenly begin challenging one of their own colleagues in this unusual way for no reason, and why did Karen never take the time to at all check out that basic question, if the matter was so important that Karen feels she can use it in her blog commentary in the slashing manner which she does? My guess is that she never even considered the possibility that such a telling lack of curiosity could have been related to her never having resolved her own shadowy hurt and rage feelings toward Doug. In her mind, it seems Doug had become a violent, mean person who attacked others as part of a malicious cult for no just reason. Thus, biasing shadow projections led her to abandon truthful journalistic objectivity and instead skew the facts so as to invalidationally dismiss the demonstrators’ legitimacy at the February 15 One Archives event, maliciously concluding that these are the same lame people who were “jerks making nuisances of themselves at a book reading.”

The One Archives Protest

In her one-sided, inaccurate blog statement Karen argues that there was no valid reason to protest Don and Mark’s One Archives event because in his Frontiers articles, “Don mentions Mitch—so Mitch is not really erased from history.” She also writes: “And surely someone into psychology knows that individuals may have differing interpretations of the same event.” And then: “Don said he had no idea what all the racket was about—he knew his truth and would respect that Mitch's follower had his truth, too.” For Don to claim ignorance of the issues at hand is ridiculous, in my opinion. How could he not know about these dynamics when he worked with Mitch as a Radical Faerie organizer for a number of years and then left the Radical Faeries with Mitch to form Treeroots specifically because of this type of personal problem? Here is not simply a case of differing interpretations; my point in the essay that I presented at the protest (see below) and the point of the challenging questioners after Don’s talk was not that Don failed to mention Mitch, but that Don is actually consciously distorting facts that he is fully aware of to create the false impression that Mitch had no real role in the formation of the Radical Faeries, for important reasons I will shortly explore further.

Karen pointedly ignores the completely different story about the Faerie Movement’s origins recounted by Stuart Timmons in his book The Trouble with Harry Hay (1990), compiled after interviewing Harry, his partner John Burnside, Mitch and Don himself, which book I quoted from in detail in my essay “Don Kilhefner’s Anti-Psychological Rewriting of Faerie History” that was attached to the protest invitation email Karen is commenting on in her blog (see “Wendell Jones’ Protest Statement” in the March 2009 archive of this blog). Stuart’s account has its own manipulative bias against Mitch, but at least he was able to extensively acknowledge Mitch’s founding role in the movement. For Don to now report in the Feb. 24, 2009 issue of Frontiers that the only involvement Mitch had in starting the Radical Faeries concerned his grumpy attendance at two meetings is ludicrous. Don worked intimately with Mitch ongoingly for nearly four years in the Radical Faeries and they both actively attempted to raise issues of psychological responsibility and shadow with Harry and the others during that time before Don left with Mitch in 1981. Not long after, in 1982, Don and Mitch founded Treeroots, an alternative educational organization, to address these new kinds of activist concerns more directly. There they worked together for more than twelve years longer promoting the study and better realization of gay psychology, before Don then resigned, in my opinion over unresolved personal issues similarly to what had happened with Harry, ironically, in that Don it seems to me was now trying to act out his shadow psychology resentfully on Mitch analogously to how Harry had previously been acting out against he and Mitch, and in the manner Karen has been likewise nastily perpetrating on Doug.

A related point concerns Karen’s assertion that Mark’s interview with Mitch in his book Gay Soul shows Mark’s own objective inclusion of Mitch in Faerie history, a claim which is, to say the least, equally as disingenuous as that concerning Don’s eliminational maneuvering. Like Don, Mark worked intimately with Mitch for many years in the Faeries and then Treeroots, and it was during this later period of quite close collaboration that Mark interviewed Mitch for Gay Soul as well as promoted Mitch’s ideas in both Gay Spirit and Gay Body. It was only after Mark was later confronted with his ethical responsibility as a presenter of gay S.M. workshops that he began criticizing Mitch privately and now has joined forces with Don to erase Mitch’s gay movement contributions from the historical record. The email invitations and ads for their One Archives presentation made no mention of Mitch at all, even though he lives in town and is at least as much of an “official” Radical Faerie co-founder as Don is, and certainly much more so than Mark. Karen can just sit back and let such meanly-biased messages go out under the illusory claim that, for example, Don is merely “presenting his truth,” a seemingly innocuous attitude about tolerating diverse perspectives that masks the ugly gay history recounted above, like reactionary Christian conservatives justificationally saying they actually love homosexuals and are not really bigoted, it’s just their legitimate and quite respectable religious view that gays will go to hell. As I said, Don was in actual fact very deeply involved with Mitch for some years, as for example evidenced by his having written Mitch dozens of substantial personal letters all through the time they worked together before Mitch moved back to L.A. in 1982 to work even more closely with Don in their new Treeroots project, missives which I have personally seen, including letters in which Don bitterly complained about the cruel and unconscious ways Harry treated him while they lived together in L.A. at a Faerie commune, a dark history that Mark is well aware of since he himself pretty much left the Faeries to join Don and Mitch after they started Treeroots. What the protest organizers criticized was Mark’s current attempt, along with Don’s, to badly rewrite gay history because of unresolved personal issues. More importantly, in altering the historical record for these self-serving reasons, Don and Mark were betraying the effort to promote better psychological authenticity and responsible consideration of destructive shadow behavior which they had worked for many years to promote along with Mitch. So when Karen states “these two gentle human beings are not the ones doing any sort of intimidation or ‘violence’,” she is again ignorantly revealing her psychological defenses against accurately recognizing the reality of the violence-prone shadow in these individuals and in her own collusive self. It is violent to consciously and persistently edit a former, supposedly beloved colleague out of history and even more so to then completely ignore this fact at a public forum on that history, or pretend it is not happening by evasively claiming, as Don does, that he simply knows his own “truth,” or as Karen does, by slavishly going along with Don’s duplicitous maneuver.

In other words, it appears to me that Don and Mark have serious shadow feelings of rage and hurt that they are resentfully acting out irresponsibly over the issue of Faerie historical truth, and Karen, who has her own unresolved matters of betrayal involving Doug, is using this opportunity of the One Archives protest to attack Doug and those associated with him as justification for her dubious actions years ago with Michael Callen and her subsequent rage when Doug forcefully confronted her on being psychologically dominated by unresolved family issues. If there were no problematic shadow dynamics involved for them in regard to the protestors’ complaints, Don and Mark would have easily acknowledged their omission of Mitch and said it was a mistake, once it was pointed out; they could have said that Mitch factually played a very important role in Faerie history that they became warmly involved in partnering but that now they have disagreements with him. And then they could have discussed those disagreements. Instead, at their presentation Don continued to deny that Mitch had any significant role in the foundation of the Faeries while he, Don, was just about the apple of Harry’s eye, and Mark in turn weasily evaded the facts through a series of clever half truths and sly evasions, with both relentlessly ignoring the seminal ethical importance of psychological growth and debate to the further development of the gay community, a far-reaching matter which those affiliated with the supposedly-visionary Radical Faeries should be vigorously promoting (I have an audio recording of the entire event and a portion of it on video as well).

Similarly, if Karen was not seriously dominated by her own shadow in this business, she could have investigated the actual history involved, but instead she thoughtlessly compounded the atrocious attempt to defame and obliterate Mitch as an important gay figure by stating, “I'm a longtime LGBT reporter and in the 20 years I've been covering people, places and things in Southern California—I have never once met Mitch Walker—who they claim is such an ‘activist.’” It’s interesting to note that Karen here implicationally makes herself into a “kingmaker” of LGBT activists, but even more importantly, she is woefully clueless about both the details and the profound meaning of Mitch’s lifelong activism. It’s certainly true that he has not been involved with the legislative fights of the more obvious gay activists, and I believe this has been fully intentional, because Mitch feels the real action has been elsewhere. Instead, when he was still only in his mid-20’s, he became the first “out” gay person to be published in a respected Jungian journal, then soon after went on to co-found the Radical Faeries with Harry and Don, and then founded Treeroots with Don, which for more than two decades presented literally hundreds of consciousness-raising gay community activities in Southern California. More recently, he has co-founded the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis, the first homosexually-centered establishment of its kind, a most serious and growing effort that since 2005 has offered more than 90 groundbreaking public educational events in West Hollywood. Of even greater significance, Mitch has thoroughly devoted himself to articulating the deepest and fullest possible vision of what it could mean to be psychologically more self-aware as a valuable gay person, writing papers, pamphlets and books that have influenced a whole generation of gay-centered psychotherapists here in Los Angeles and elsewhere, those who in my opinion are very much in the real trenches of progressive gay activism today. Mitch has pioneered a groundbreaking gay-centered contribution to Jungian theory by describing a unique process of gay male psychological development through archetypes such as the double and Uranian Eros. His writing has been referenced by many others in the field. However, although press releases about Treeroots events and then those of the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis have been sent to Frontiers and IN Los Angeles for years, as Karen says, she always ignored them and “passed them on to others” because she could not be objective about these things given her animosity towards Doug. Thus, it appears to me that her unresolved resentment, overall lack of objectivity, covert pro-family stance and virulently anti-psychological attitude have conspiratorially led her to altogether ignore not only Mitch’s important historical activist role promoting gay-centered psychological liberation, but also, more to the point, the healthful appreciation needed by gay self and community for sufficiently confronting entrenched internalized homophobic effects in the form of an endemic gay shadow problem.

In her conclusion, Karen states that at the Archives presentation, when “someone asked why there wasn't a Radical Faerie group in L.A. Don held out his hand and said, ‘Because of this.’ Meaning the angry divisiveness,” suggesting that people like the demonstrators had destroyed the Radical Faeries just as we ruined Mark’s book reading. This is simply not true. I would instead argue the opposite, that the failure to frankly and fairly address angry and hurt feelings, an insistence on hiding “personal” differences and leaving them to fester, is what fatally hindered better Radical Faerie organizing here in town. I have gone into some detail in Part I discussing how this recurrent failure was enabled during the planning for a 1994 Southern California Radical Faerie gathering, and in this part I have shared my similarly-themed experiences of Mark and the Radical Faerie brother he disowned who became HIV-positive, but I know of numerous other examples illustrating this same problem. Many gay men would come to Faerie gatherings, for example, and then feel alienated or excluded, subsequently never coming back. I saw this over and over in the course of my long-time participation. Other Radical Faeries, like myself, eventually left local Radical Faerie circles because of the persistent failure to address the hurt feelings and unconscious destructive behavior that eventually arise in all gay associations (as well as non-gay groups) when psychological issues are defensively ignored while covertly acted out. Many of us Faerie dropouts continued to organize and promote Gay Spirit development to greater or lesser success in subsequent groups like Tumescence, the Gay Men’s Medicine Circle, the California Men’s Gathering, Body Electric, Treeroots, and the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis. Star Circle, the group that organized the 1994 Faerie Gathering fiasco I related in Part I of this statement, ended shortly thereafter as an overall community forum, but the Faeries I had been meeting with prior to 1994 continued to organize retreats for years, some of which Harry attended. No confrontations or angry divisiveness ever stopped any of this organizing from going on. In fact, a Los Angeles Faerie named Matrix still hosts small “faerie gatherettes” that are listed on the web.

One participant at Don and Mark’s presentation actually said that he suspected Radical Faeries were still meeting in Los Angeles, just in different forms, a statement that Karen, who was there, ignores. Karen promotes the audacious lie that Radical Faerie organizing ended in Los Angeles because of “angry divisiveness” because she wants to imply that any confrontation with how people unconsciously act out shadow issues in the gay community is so upsetting and disruptive that it destroys constructive community building.

She furthers this backwards argument in her blog commentary with the following closing innuendo: “Many of the folks in the audience—especially the young people—wanted to find out about their history and perhaps find out about why gay people are different from heterosexuals. 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.” She is saying that those who asked challenging questions disrupted the presentation so thoroughly that no practicable discussion of gay history or concepts of gay identity was accessibly possible. But in actuality, Don and Mark’s presentation was not interrupted. Demonstrators passed out substantial written materials outside so that those interested could find out more information about the history involved in a way that would not block or disorganize Don and Mark’s presentation itself, and most attendees seemed pleased to accept the materials. Protestors inside the hall who asked why Don and Mark were distorting important history waited politely until Don and Mark had finished their talk and opened the floor to questions before they spoke in turn and, as far as I know, none of them raised their voices until their questions were persistently only ignored or evaded and they were then told to quit asking because it was time to move on to other questions. Even then, only a few brief angry comments were uttered. In fact, the presenters then went on to fully answer all other questions offered without any interruption. If the young people who attended were unable to “find out about their history and perhaps find out about why gay people are different from heterosexuals,” it was not the fault of the demonstrators, but points to a fundamental inadequacy of Don and Mark’s presentation, which, in my view, amounted to a badly emasculated and trivializing version of real Faerie history and future gay possibility.

Once again, I argue that Karen is defensively projecting her own shadow in her complaint. She claims that the protestors are trying to stop people from learning about their history, when it is actually Karen who is actively trying to thwart knowing our gay past through her ad hominem innuendos that create a badly falsified impression of real events. Karen is doing exactly what she accuses Doug of journalistically enacting at the start of her blog attack on him, skewing depictions so that the result no longer corresponds in key ways to the actual events that did truly happen.

Concluding Thoughts

Karen insinuates throughout her blog commentary, as well as directly claiming, that all of the confrontations I participated in and have discussed were instigated by Mitch Walker, whom she portrays as a maniacal and Machiavellian figure who fiercely manipulates others to do his nasty bidding. But as I stated earlier, when I wrote my original response to Don’s article that was attached to the call to protest, I wrote it spontaneously without consulting anyone else because I felt deeply provoked morally by the situation, and because I have been personally sincerely inspired by the great support Mitch has given me over the years as a fellow gay being and activist, and even more so because I sincerely believe that his boldly unrepentant stance, wherein Radical Faerie and all gay activists must seriously confront the unconscious, shadowy ways homosexual people and especially themselves individually can unwittingly viciously attack and harm each other due to the vexing psychological problem of internalized homophobia through both blatant and subtle forms of violent, destructive behavior like unsafe sex, personal dishonesty, domination in group activities and attack journalism, is a perhaps daunting but crucial message which if anything seems to me even more valid and needed today than it was at the founding of the Radical Faerie movement more than 30 years ago.

Throughout her malicious defense of what are actually Mark’s and Don’s own various violent maneuvers, using rumor-mongering smears against the organizers of the protest as well as many other irrational methods, Karen is thereby mal-appropriately advocating that our persistent psychological aggression towards each other should simply remain a secret matter not to be exposed before, during or after its poisonous enactment, just as the unrelenting homophobic violence in our families of origin is likewise kept hidden from a needed and thorough accounting. She dismissively states that, in general, “therapy-related stories are more ‘lifestyle’ than news,” so she passes over them as a journalist, which is the crux of my problem with her bigoted stance. The so-called therapy-related stories she refuses to cover are, to me and many others, a centrally newsworthy aspect of the Gay Liberation story and particularly in regard to its better future, thus really the most significant kind of journalistic topic which a gay newsmagazine could possibly cover.

The first Gay Liberation organization I joined in 1970 was part of a global coalition that included women’s liberation, revolutionary people of color, environmental groups, spiritual seekers, antiwar activists and others committed to creating a more sanely humanistic world that could hopefully save our planet in a time of crisis. Gay Liberation was seen then as an essential part of creating such a viable future, but today gay magazines such as Frontiers in L.A. and The Advocate have abandoned covering that story. Gay Liberation is instead reduced to a fight for the “right” to assimilate, to become upfront military murderers for an arrogant imperial power, to get legally married and create dysfunctional families all too much like the torturous “prisons” in which we were each personally raised, to more thoroughly join in that vacuous, never-ending consumption which is quickly destroying our once-lovely globe. The occasional psychological views that do get mentioned in the gay press usually offer simplistic platitudes that provide no real help in the necessary struggle to better differentiate ourselves from collective conformity and become more fully developed, unique gay individuals. I wrote my original critique and this two-part blog statement because of my great love for our homosexual freedom movement, and because Mitch Walker is the only person I know of who has offered consistent leadership in the just fight to continue a true liberationist-oriented gay effort by arguing that Gay Liberation is now at a watershed psychological crossroads because of assimilationist success, and that only by more effectively confronting our dangerous gay shadows can we best continue our emancipatory project to reach our greatest homosexual and humane potentials, our richer same-sex-loving possibilities, to be not blinded members of a hypocritical cult of false psychology but to be more fully realized, independent gay individuals who can begin taking better ethical responsibility for all our actions in the world as we reach for the best we can each authentically become, creatively, spiritually and lovingly.