Eugene Pride 2025

Last Saturday, I wanted to march in the Eugene Pride parade while holding Mark’s hand. Retrospectively, I had an unconscious desire to recreate the magical NYC Pride float experience of 2023, only with Mark this time. This was probably at odds with Mark’s disinclination to participate in public events, like dancing, or the Saturday Market, or Eugene LGBTQ+ choral performances, or the Eugene Bright Parade. Which can bring out his contrarian side.

On one hand, two over-fifty, gay, married men holding hands while one of them waved a small rainbow flag is a political statement about gay life, gay liberty, and the pursuit of gay happiness; on the other hand my imagining of the moment involved fast-paced 1970’s disco, and gauzy rainbow on the edges—I’m pretty sure in my vision we weren’t marching so much as gliding. So probably more fabulous than what was going to happen.

This year the Pride Celebration was moved up from August in Alton Baker Park to June in the Lane County Fairgrounds. Of course this caused controversy. I prefer having Eugene Pride in June when it’s typically cooler; and I’d much rather march in the rain at the end of grass pollen season than under a 95°F August sun in the middle of wildfire smoke season. Security was also a concern: it’s easier to put up fencing around the fairground venues than it is a city park. The security measures also meant a bag-check for non-clear bags and no signs, banners, or flags larger than 11X18 inches.

Mark wanted to skip the rally at Kesey Square and just join the 10:30 parade from the square to the fairgrounds. Since dealing with the car would probably be a rigamarole, we opted to walk downtown—which takes about twenty-five minutes. Between yoga, looking after a neighbor’s animals, dealing with some of The Child’s childhood junk treasures, slathering on sun screen, and taking the dog to the dog park—but no gay brunch—we started out not quite as early as I would have liked. Which necessitated a brisk walk—water bottle swinging from my belt; 12X18-inch pride flag in my hand; and keys, tickets, mobile, and wallet in my back pockets. It was already a clear-skied 72°F.

Somewhere along Willamette Street my paper ticket to Pride worked its way out of my back pocket.

We got to Kesey Square at 10:32. It was quiet. And empty. An abandoned, pink, open, VooDoo Donuts box did its best tumbleweed imitation next to the statue of Ken Kesey. I still don’t know if the parade started early, or if the rally decamped to a different march staging area.

We walked west on Broadway Street toward the fairgrounds and met some other folks also looking for the march.

Mark noticed my rising Sun-in-Capricorn-Moon-in-Virgo-You’re-Doing-It-Wrong-This-Is-Why-We-Can’t-Have-Nice-Things sense of frustration and advised me to breathe out frustration and breathe in calm. Or something. We found a bakery with chocolate brownies, macarons, and coffee for Mark.

As we were paying, someone behind the register took in my black T-shirt with a Progress Pride flag on it, my Rainbow flag, and very likely my Hair and asked for a social media photo.

Fortified with the photo-op and some little white bags of baked goods, we soldiered on, ever westward.

As we neared Franklin Street, I caught the sounds of drums, and we could see police blocking off streets. We were just in time to insert ourselves into the tail end of the parade and jockeyed for a space between various other groups based on whatever it was their signs and banners read. No one resurrected the chant, “Hey-hey, ho-ho…”.

I waved my little Pride flag. “Hey, Mark,” I said. “Give me those bags.”

“I can carry them,” Mark said.

I eyed the small cup of coffee in his other hand. “But I wanna hold your hand.”

“Where’s your brownie?” he said.

“I snarfed it as soon as we left the bakery.”

I held the flag and the bags in one hand and Mark’s hand in the other. It was nice for about sixty seconds until I had to let go of Mark’s hand to push my hair out of my face. Which prompted mock-protests of a typical Leo nature from Mark about being abandoned.

Five blocks later the parade transmogrified into a fairground entrance line. After an interval of shuffling, during which I realized that I could display my ticket on my phone, we made it through the Event Center back entrance doors and emerged next to a stage where dancers we wanted to see were scheduled.

We sat down in the audience section and got blasted by loudspeakers during a sound system accident.

Mark thought having Pride in the Fairgrounds venue made it seem like a combination of the Eugene Holiday Market or Boat/Home Show, which was a little cramped and overwhelming for him. He would have liked vendor booths arranged circularly around a central performance area instead of the grid layout they used. He also missed being able to picnic on the grass (which is hard to have inside).

I did like being in the shaded, if not air-conditioned, indoors; but it would have been nice to have picnic tables set up.

The dance groups were entertaining and interesting.

Prompted by the experience with parade, I made a point of asking someone at the information table where the after-party dance was going to be held (since the location wasn’t clear). We bumped into four folks we knew and had quick updates with them.

And then we were done.

We walked back home.

I spent the afternoon digging through an unorganized collection of mostly papers looking for my party ear-plugs. I found them behind some coffee-table books on Ancient Egyptian Art.

Around 7 p.m., I drove to the 21+ after-party dance event, which was located next to the Lane County Events Center, in an old Quonset hut. In some ways, it was a throw-back to the dance floor, twenty years ago, at Perry’s on Pearl; only with newer songs. And much less clothing. With go-go boys.

The music was danceable, and I was glad for the earplugs. I had fun, and I was dancing by myself in a Quonset hut filled with people. I thought about braving the long line to purchase a soft drink or mocktail, and wound up paying $3 for a 16oz bottle of water. I danced to the four quarters, and stayed in my body. I danced and danced, and only realized the music kept on playing a half-hour after the dance’s official end when I looked at my phone.

The crescent moon hung above the western horizon as I walked past folks breaking down chairs and booths; past the deflated rainbow arch at the Event Center front entrance; through the main parking lot and over a creek, to where the car waited in auxiliary parking.

Impressions on Penczak's "Gay Witchcraft"

After at least twenty years, I've finally managed to get my hands on a 2003 copy of “Gay Witchcraft: Empowering the Tribe,” by Christopher Penczak. It’s a Wicca 101 book, highlighted with gay overtones. It’s the sort of book I would have loved in the 1980s; it appears to be grounded in sources like Margot Adler, Janet and Stewart Farrar, Marija Gimbutas, Charles Leland, Starhawk, and Native American practices. Early chapters are a survey of world pantheons with a focus on gay, lesbian, and transgender deities where applicable. Later chapters are quick sketches of astrology, reiki, crystal healing, and herbal remedies.

It’s more same-sex centered than “The Gay Wicca Book,” by Bruce K Wilborn. It does have some ritual and practices for same-sex lovers, but it’s not really a gay essentialist tome in the way Storm Faerywolf’s more earthy “Satyr’s Kiss” is. Specifically, the Great Rite—placing an athame (ritual blade) into a chalice—is presented as a symbol for the heteronormative union of the Horned God and the Great Mother, i.e. Heiros Gamos, which in itself is a symbol for the union of cosmic principles. While I appreciated the handful of paragraphs exploring the Oak and Holly Kings recast as lovers, I did wish for more exploration of cis gay male eros, agape, and amore as a source of gay gnosis and as a lens for queer praxis within the framework of American Wicca.

To work beyond the book, it could be fruitful to one’s personal practice to explore decoupling elemental tools and directions from a male or female view. I’m not sure if that would make, say, a wand both masculine and feminine, neither male nor female, or some other intersection of the gender continuum. Perhaps it could be useful to move linguistically from statements like “fire is male” to “fire has male” (in the same way that one might say “he has hunger” instead of “he’s hungry.”) At the very least a reexamination of how gender and desire are woven into symbolic correspondences would result in more mindful symbolic acts, i.e. rituals.

I suppose to continue the decoupling, one could explore silent, mimed ritual. (Pause to imagine Wiccans trapped in a glass box.) Hmm. Maybe not. I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there, somewhere.

A Review of "The Satyr's Kiss"

Storm Faerywolf's "The Satyr's Kiss: Queer men, Sex Magic, and Modern Witchcraft" is a queering of of Feri Wiccan theory and practice, and a queer presentation of sexually explicit ritual and spell craft. 

I purchased this book because I'd been impressed with Storm Faerywolf's other writings about how using a calendar and clock effectively would help with one's spiritual practices; because he identifies as a cis-male, gay, Neopagan; and because if I'm going to read a book about sex magic, it may as well be cis-male, gay Neopagan sex magic. 

Like Starhawk, Storm Faerywolf's spiritual practice is grounded in the American Feri Wicca tradition of Victor and Cora Anderson.   But this is a book that doesn't take itself too seriously; it's a casual book that wants to take you to a fabulously earthy brunch.  This book is not "The Spiral Dance," and Storm Faerywolf is not Starhawk.  Neither is this book "The Triumph of the Moon," and Faerywolf is not Ronald Hutton.  

"The Satyr's Kiss" is divided into a philosophy section and a praxis section. The philosophy section is part introduction to Feri Wicca, part queering of Wicca, part gay history, and part the basics of sex magic.  The praxis section is a collection of rituals and spells.  

I found the review of Feri Wicca's concept of the three-part soul—fetch, talking self, and divine soul—interesting, as well as the mapping of Oak King, Holly King, and holy daemon.  I did wish for more of an exploration into the history of the two kings and why Faerywolf chose to adapt them as apposed to, say, Cernunnos and The Green Man or a trio of gods instead of a duo.  The Feri iron pentacle meditation is introduced, along with a queer variant called the amethyst pentacle. 

Gay history, like much of the material in this book, is painted in broad strokes, which gives it a strong 101 feel.  It does allow Fairywolf to construct a ritual calendar which supplements the Pagan wheel of the year and which honors the lives and deaths of various queer luminaries, such as Harvey Milk and Matthew Shepherd, and events such as the Stonewall Riots.  

While acknowledging the author wanting to avoid Hay's NAMBLA advocacy, I think there is a missed opportunity to explore Harry Hay's concept of subject-subject consciousness, and his ideas behind founding the radical faeries.  Given the number of times the author (possibly at the guidance of the publisher) reminds his readers that any sex magic described in "The Satyr's Kiss" needs to happen between legally consenting adults and that neither he nor his publisher are responsible for the readers doing something stupid or unlawful, I can see why glossing over Hay could be the easier path to take. 

In the same vein, I felt that Oscar Wilde's representation as a late 1800's aesthete and the historical backlash to the aesthete could have been expanded and connected to the sections on other types of gay cis-men.  Both Hay and Wilde are listed as honored ancestors, which would have justified a deeper dive, but "The Satyr's Kiss" really only lists people in summary.  At least this is a good starting point for folks wishing to do deeper research into the lives and main events of the queer community.

Other parts of the philosophy section broadly tell the stories of gods, heroes, mythical creatures (e.g. unicorns), historical, and contemporary figures through a queer lens.  There's not much consultation or interpretation of archeological or historical records, which contributes to a "I read this on Wikipedia" feel.  I suppose the point isn't so much to provide provenance for the stories as it is to provide queer inspiration.

The philosophy behind the sections on sex magic could be summarized "...Sex is something that we should do / Sex is something for me and you / Sex is natural sex is good / Not everybody does it / But everybody should / Sex is natural, sex is fun..."  Fairywolf points out that queer folks, even the ones who aren't cis gay male ones, are sexual beings, and as magic practitioners we should be able to practice magic with every aspect of ourselves.  The three main premises of sex magic are 1) the physical mechanics of sexual and erotic acts produces an ecstatic trance state conducive to casting spells and other numinous actions; 2) orgasm is a liminal and numinous state, and 3) because bodies are sacred, semen—like blood, saliva, or menstrual fluids—is chock full of life force and therefore an efficacious component of rituals and spells.  (While there wasn't a gay male version of Starhawk's "Spell To Be Friends With Your Womb," which would have been "Spell To Be Friends With Your Prostate," there were some that came close.)

In addition to some practical and health advice about sex, I also appreciated the advice about practicing sex magic:  "Sex magic is fun and powerful, but it should't be an excuse for being careless with each other's emotions or for simply expanding one's circle of sexual partners.  As always, if you want to have an orgy, have an orgy.  If you need Witchcraft to give you permission for indulging in carnal pleasures, then you have some deeper personal work to do first."  

The praxis section is less a book of shadows and more a collection of rhymed stanzas and suggestions for performing magical acts, with varying degrees of auto- or group sex.  Fairywolf is broad and general with his descriptions in an attempt at universality and to avoid "arbitrary details."  l should confess that I am not the biggest fan of the author's poetry.  Some of it is fine as ritual litany; some of it could use another pass to address issues with the meter.  As the author often prefaces his ritual descriptions with instructions to alter or rewrite ritual to better fit one's personal tastes and ritual needs, this makes me want to treat the poetry more like suggested guidelines rather than sacred texts.

The conclusion of "The Satyr's Kiss" is a general overview of what a queer coven might look like, with examples from Fairywolf's coven, the Brotherhood of the Satyr, and how the ideas, spells, and rituals presented in the book might be used to realize it.  Fairywolf stresses the importance of boundaries and the differences between a coven and group therapy.  A brief list of resources concludes the book.  

Coming Out To Myself

About seven years ago somebody asked, "when did you know you were gay?"  I wrote most of this then, saved it as a draft, forgot about it and have recently re-discovered it.

In 1976, I instinctually knew that my sexuality was dangerous for me to express.  Well, OK, I had some help from disapproving peers: they used to point and chant, "Burridge got a boner!" during P.E., and those were the nicest ones.  For the record, there wasn't any one person or persons turning me on; I just felt sexy,  I guess--or more likely hormonal. With the power of twelve-year-olds, I invoked Mr. Spock and put a wall around my emotions and my sexual desires.  This was a protective insulation that I kept wrapped around me for about twenty years.  It made me want to be a particle physicist.  It also kept me from emotional connections of all sorts.  (I still find locker rooms uncomfortable.) 

It never occurred to me that I was gay.  In the seventies and eighties, the only gay people I knew were fictional.  The fictional Jack Tripper, who only pretended to be gay on the television situation comedy "Three's Company;" the fictional Bunny Wigglesworth, the gay, whip wielding twin brother of Zorro--played by George Hamilton in "Zorro, The Gay Blade;" the simpering subjects of various jokes about fairies; and the eponymous queer in the football game "Smear the Queer."  Oh, yes; The Village People... they didn't exactly count because because A) we usually only heard their music and didn't see them, B) it was Oregon, and the cultural significance of the Village was lost on middle schoolers, and C) we were too busy contorting into the letters Y M C and A to think about homosexual sex.

Because of this, I developed a persona that was "cute." It was my way of saying, "Hi. I'm harmless.  Don't hurt me. I'm cute. Like me.  Hey, I just want to do science."  I would go on 1980's dates with my female friends--we were both Manic Pixie Girls.

In 1983, my first same-sex desires were furtive and I was drawn to them several times only to recoil from them.  I wish my first sexual experience as an eighteen year old had been beautiful and affirming; instead, my first shared post-orgasmic words to my not-boyfriend-I'm-not-gay-fooling-around-with were "Um, that was kind of gross."  I spent the rest of my college life serial crushing on romantically unavailable women (he transferred to another college).

Apparently, from 1983 to 1995, many people assumed I was gay and assumed I knew (which explains some awkward moments).  Also, you had to hit me over the head with a clue-by-four if you were romantically interested in me (which explains some other awkward moments).

I came out to myself in 1995, after a highly symbolic dream involving a hallway of doors, hotel cleaning staff, message oil, crashing through a tenth story window, and women with Hair to Heaven singing, "Hallelujah, Amen!"  When I cast the dream into prose form and read it during an open mic night at Arcosanti, I instantly became Mr. Arcosanti Gay Resources (in spite of the fact that I was still single and there were other gay men on site).

Back in Oregon, after a couple of fun-but-confusing sexual encounters, I'd say my first beautiful and affirming sexual experience was 1996... and then I promptly worried that despite various safe sex measures,  I'd contracted something.   My slutty stage was cut short when I met Mark a week later.

Mark is the first person I've loved who has loved me back (no pressure).

Postscript:  I was very lucky.  Around 2002, I was contacted by my college not-gay-not-boyfriend via a random e-mail.  Once I was out to myself, I said to myself that if we ever ran into each other that I would say or write the following:  "Hello.  I wanted to apologize for my actions when I was eighteen.  We were sexually attracted to each other.  I was homophobic and I treated you badly.  I'm sorry."  He forgave me.

Queer Books

For Pride Month this year, I've been posting photos of myself prominently holding up book covers of books from the gay male and queer theory section of my library.  Then I've posted little mini-reviews or summaries to Instagram > Twitter and Facebook.   My plan was to do a book a day for the month.  We'll see if I have enough books -- I'll be including books that overlap the NeoPagan and Gay Male/Queer community as well.

In a way, the books were my gay (and to a lesser extent my NeoPagan) community, especially over the long time period during which I was navigating my sexuality and sexual preferences in several small town settings.  I've discovered that my library doesn't have much in the way of gay male / queer theory past about 2000.  I've also discovered that some of my books haven't aged well.  My sense is that in the 90's, thinking about gender and orientation was much more binary -- so authors were focused on essential gay male consciousness, or on if they were assimilating too much into heteronormative ideals.  There was an awful lot of focus on gay men's (supposed) low self esteem, which in turn led to risky, promiscuous behavior, which in turn contributed to the AIDS crisis.  I'm not even sure if gay male low self-esteem is still even a thing.   Don't get me started on Iron John in Drag.

It's possible one reason I stopped purchasing queer theory books is that I found Mark, and I didn't need any theory anymore.  Another reason is that I kept hoping to find the gay male equivalent of Starhawk, but instead I eventually discovered Ronald Hutton.  

Musing on Fantasy Travel

Sunday was a quiet day, as was the weekend.  We went for a walk around a Eugene nature preserve set between two highways.  I'm not sure how the birds get any sleep.  Mark was very excited to see a nutria.  We had hoped to see more of the beavers than two dams and three lodges (one look abandoned).  There were lots of ducks and geeese, and a few herons.

I was thinking about how fantasy travelers would feel, mostly because there was a light rain and my hands got cold holding the binoculars, so I spent most of the walk with them tucked under the layers I wore (a sweater-hoody under the Romulan Jacket under the wool cloak).  My feet were a little cold because my gym shoes aren't exactly waterproof -- which made me think about horses and walking along roads and tracks and if one were on the road how much firewood would you need or want to carry... and now that I think about it, one of you is a magic user who spent time working in the lighthouses of a port city, so making light wouldn't be a problem.  So two guys and their horses, traveling on a road. . .  so inns or bandits... oh, or coaches.  Right. . . .

On the TV front, Mark found a recording of the new Queer Eye.  I'm trying to think if the new Fab 5 are substantially younger than the originals... and I'm thinking that they're mostly in the thirty-something demographic, which makes them look younger because I'm now in the fifty-something demographic.

Word Count: 750 words.

Monday.  Went to the gym.  300 cal on the Nordic Elliptical.  3x13x30lbs deltoid fly.  13x(30+40+40) pec fly.  13x(50+0+70)lbs on the lat pull-downs.  3x13x30lb barbell curls.  3x13 Roman Chair curls.  3x13x30lbs triceps pull-downs.  No free dumbbell work.

Word Count: 750 words. 

Same-Sex Marriage

The New York Times writes: 

Justice Kennedy rooted the ruling in a fundamental right to marriage. Of special importance to couples, he said, is raising children.

 “Without the recognition, stability and predictability marriage offers,” he wrote, “their children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life. The marriage laws at issue here thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex couples.”

This has been a legal issue on the radar since at least 2004.  Hardy Myers, then acting Attorney General for Oregon, pointed out in a March 2004 opinion that children of same-sex couples are monetarily discriminated against by the government because of the sexual orientation of their parents. This makes them a minority class deserving of special protection -- which they don't get. (http://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2009/06/lgbt-pride-month.html)

Oddly, I can't seem to find his March 12(?) 2004 non-binding opinion piece at http://www.doj.state.or.us/releases/pages/index_2004.aspx  Which basically said, the Oregon Supreme Court will probably rule that either or both homosexuals and their children are a minority class deserving special protection under Article 1, Section 20 of the Oregon constitution, but we should punt this to the tyrannical majority for a vote (Measure 36, amending Oregon's Constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman, passed that later November).


The Supreme Court's decision is here:  http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf 

More Double-Plus Good Equal Than Others

Lately I've been seeing a lot of posts about authors in social media that have lists in them.  They remind me of Cynthia Eller's comments in "The Myth of a Prehistoric Matriarchy," where she talks about lists associated with "Cakes for the Queen of Heaven," that go something like this:

female	male
soft	hard
intuitive	logical
peaceful	warlike
good	bad

Okay, so the lists aren't quite that bald, but the implication is there.  The lists that I'm seeing are a little more nuanced, because they all start straight-white-cis-male, so there's more of a matrix to play with, but they have that same feeling to them that the lists academia had in the late 1980's of old-dead-white-European-males (who are obviously a waste of time to read) .  

As a gay male Neo-Pagan who comes up against the heteronormative narrative in most of the Neo-Pagan literature I've read, I'm all for raising awareness and expanding the repertoire of voices heard in the stories we tell.  But having had the "you can't be a real pagan unless you're a woman" card played on me several times, I really hope we can leave judgments of "good" and "bad" writing untethered from an author's gender, gender-expression, and orientation.  (And yeah, I did submit to Queers Destroy Science Fiction, but I want my story to be published there because it's a good story, not simply because a gay man wrote it.)

Synthesis and Progress

I've been trying to synthesize what Joanna Russ said about voice being "on the slant," and her imaginings of macho Kirk, the golden grain god and "egalitarian other alien" Spock, the dark Pan god as same-sex lovers; what Jo Eldride Carney says about stories about Queens reinforcing the narrative of patriarchy; and my dreams.


In my dreams deity expresses itself as queer and male which is A) able to balance spiritual love, romantic love, and sexual love; B) a mediator between immanent, nurturing, divine, erotic waters and culture; and, C) in touch with and informed by fiery erotic creative inspiration.  Looking at the dream imagery, I'd paraphrase this as the rhyton and the snake.

Hmmm.  Now all I have to do is write around these symbols in a way that is interesting, yet not preachy.  

---

On the submission front, I'd been waiting and waiting for a market to get back to me, and was about to query them when I checked their web site. It turned out they'd rejected my story (based on their usual turn-around-time, probably two weeks ago), but the e-mail must have crossed somewhere. 

 On the writing front, the other night I passed a piece of 800 word flash through the table. This time around, walking over the Plank of Description, I fell not into the Deep Pool of Too Much Detail, but instead into the Trickle of Not Enough Information. Most everyone got bits and pieces of the story, one person figured it all out, and the person sitting next to me kept going "OH!" as the critique progressed and little bits of the puzzle were revealed.

And now, back to writing.

Dream: Rhyton Priest

I had this dream October 16 of 2012.  I thought I posted it to the blog at the time, but apparently, I hadn't.  The dream was part of a FaceBook Discussion.  I'm posting it now because it's a particularly meaningful dream for me.

Just before I went to bed, I read a post about a Christian straight man from Tacoma who pretended to be gay for a year so he could write a book about his experiences.  At first I had several conflicting emotional responses ranging from, curiosity as to what he had did, cynicism about writing a book about his experiences, and a sense of betrayal and cultural appropriation.  But... I haven't read his book and I wanted to wait before responding to the [FaceBook] post [by David Raines, I think, asking for reactions].

As I expected I might, I had a dream which I think addresses this... (and no, I still haven't read the book).

The dream started out about rentals and insurance, and then transitioned.

I was in a dry land, with lots of large stony blocks.   I have an image of a river emerging from the fallen stones.  Somehow we were either performing "Jesus Christ, Superstar," and/else we were living in the historical time of Christ as an adult.  I have a recollection of togas or white robes.

A group of about six of us formed a procession into the shallow cave from which the river issued.  There was some sort of ritualistic taking of water or wine from a rhyton.  I'm trying to recall if the rhyton used was carved or not.  My sense was that it was plain, and gently curved like a horn.  I think it was stone or ceramic.  It was large and heavy with the liquid inside.  

(Here's some examples of non-plain rhytons)

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/30005340

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/130017295

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/130007897

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/130011051

We passed it around, squirting the water into each other's mouths.  Having taken the waters together, we processed outside into the bright morning sunlight.  I had the full, heavy rhyton (I have a sense of it resting on my shoulder), and was taking its contents back with me to distribute (I'm not sure where or to who).

A woman (a religious Christian person I know from real life) with a kind of crown of nails (points outward from her head -- in waking life she reminds me of Mary Hansen's painting of The Queen of Swords) was at the gathering outside on the stone blocks.  

She was of a different faith, but my sense was that we were all priests and priestesses together, so I offered and she accepted the spurt of liquid that shot from the rhyton when I removed my finger from its opening.  I have a sense that there was another woman there in brilliant white robes (there was a short conversation, or the brilliantly garbed woman explained something to the other woman).  The water shooting into her (the Christian woman's) mouth was a thin stream, as if from a garden hose spigot only slightly opened or an atomizer.  In waking, this seems wildly Freudian (it could only be more so if milk came out of the rhyton instead of water), but in the dream the emotional emphasis was the satisfaction of sharing water in order to quench another's thirst.   

To interpret this dream... If you want to understand the message of the waters, you can drink from the source, or you can (less immediately) drink through an intermediary.  Also, this dream is a metaphor for my understanding of the male expression of deity...  

So, yay for Tacoma guy for trying to experience what it's like to be discriminated against for being perceived as gay, and yay for this guy questioning his religiously-motivated intolerance, but his message of the grace of queers would have been stronger had he actually been queer.  

Writing as a Gay Man

I've been thinking about writing and the following words--wishes, fears, knowledge, background, experiences and desires--and how they relate to me as a writer who is also a gay male.  Other than occasionally writing gay male characters, I'm not sure how I write as a gay man.  I write women characters, too, and I'm pretty sure that doesn't make me a female writer.

(Pause for gay super-hero madness...)

I stand before my secret Phallic Shrine, which is guarded by a band of taut satyrs, and which I go to to renew my Gay Writer's Pen.  In the pink glow of the shrine, I hold my pen up to the Mystic Gay Phallus and recite:  "By Brightest Day / By Darkest Night / My Gay Body / Brings Great Insight / Let All Who Worship / Writing Trite / Beware My Power / Gay Writer's Might!"  When writing wrongs, those whom I have rescued exclaim, "Ooh! Look at that pen!  You must be... Gay Writer!"  

(Meanwhile, back at the essay...)

My personal gay male story is probably not as a unique an experience as it sometimes feels to me.... I officially came out in 1995, when I was thirty-one (hooray for me, I got to go through awkward dating rituals fifteen years after high school).  As a result the gay narratives of the Baby Boomer Generation feel like they're for characters in an old play, and the gay narrative of Gen Y seems like it's come from some inappropriate party-tunes radio show.

Trying a different tack, I wonder if I can approach being a writer who is gay by asking how I read as a gay man.  Man, that sounds like a Gay Agenda Joke waiting to happen.  

Um, it would be nice to read about gay characters who don't die in car crashes as soon (or just before) they discover their same-sex desire, or who don't die so we can see how the other gay character is sad and noble.  It would be nice to have gay characters who are more than just gay, or who spend time outside of a gay ghetto.  I want my gay characters to be more than "magic gay guys" who exist only to give another (usually straight) character advice and who's sole source of wisdom is that they're gay (Queer Eye, I'm looking at you).  I'd like more stories that are not about coming out, pride, or reminiscences about post-stonewall/pre-AIDS New York City.  And just because there's a gay guy in a story isn't going to automatically make me like it; it has to be a good story.

There... that's enough queer literary theory for today...   

Gay Beltane

Beltane is coming up, with all its "Tra-la, It's May!" imagery.

If you do an image search on Pinterest for "beltane" or "beltaine" you get lots of saucy pictures of white folks dressed in scanty scraps of green, with crystals or elk horns stuck on their foreheads. Or you get suggestively posed trees. There's some maypole dancing, and a few folks jumping over flames. Oh, yeah; and deely-bopper-anteneaed flower fairies.

If you do an image search for "gay beltane" or "gay beltaine" you get _nothing_. Not even gym-queens in Pan drag. Same thing for "lesbian beltane" and "LGBT beltane." Granted, this is Pinterest and not the whole internet. But still, it reflects the heteronormativity of the Neo-pagan community.

I've always had difficulties squaring homosexuality with mainstream Neo-pagan celebrations of Beltaine because attempts to do so seem like simple token substitutions (http://johnburridge.blogspot.com/2009/02/why-im-solitary-neo-pagan.html). To be fair, my latest Google search did bring up an interesting ritual exploring the erotic relationship between the Greenman and the Horned God as a metaphor for the interconnectivity of as the plant kingdom and the as the animal kingdom. ... and then it turned into a discussions of the symbolic roles of tops and bottoms.

Turning away from the internet, when I think of this time, I tend to not think in terms of Beltane and more in terms of it being The Ides of Spring: the purifying balance-point between the new beginnings of the Spring Equinox and the transformations of the Summer Solstice. For me, the male divinity of this festival manifests as an attractive man, drumming, with flowers or a wreath in his hair. I like the custom of jumping over a fire, or passing between two fires as a kind of purification--and a ritual circle of scantily-clad men drumming together around a roaring bon-fire for purification would be enchanting. And hot.

Thinking about the ritual and the erotic energy connected to this festival, I can't help think about boundaries and taboo--which circles around again to purification. And then I get conflicted thinking about how to share this kind of festival with my family. I know balancing body- and sex-positive ritual with family-friendly ritual is an on-going debate within the NeoPagan community, and it gets even more complicated in a mixed-faith family. I imagine some Neo-Pagan families get a babysitter for the "adult" rituals.

Beltane Babysitter. Now there's a story idea.

Masculinity & Steampunk

Santos Dumont
Wikimedia Commons

 Lately, I've been writing a story set in a world with an alternate history where magic works, it's the beginning of the 20th century, and dirigibles are in the air.  The process has been an integrative one for me, because little bits of history that I've usually not connected in my head have come together.

My story involves a small airship, slightly larger than the one Santos Dumont flew around the Eiffel Tower circa 1900.  (The really big airships, like the zeppelins of Germany, didn't appear in historical skies until about 1910.  Transatlantic and trans-US crossings didn't happen until the 1930's.)  

Lewis Hine, 1920.
Power house mechanic
working on steam pump.
Wikimedia Commons

Since my characters are American citizens raised in England, they "Remember the Maine!"  It also means they're Victorians.  My challenge writing alternate-history American-Victorians is preserving the feel of culture while writing a gay male character who isn't committing "a sin unspeakable in Christian circles," and a female character more active than Willamina Harker.  (Yes, the Harkers and Count Dracula are from this time period, too.)  I think I can justify some of the characters' cultural expectation by using an alternate history religion that I've played with before -- it helps that instead of a same-sex trinity, the godhead is a gender-balanced quartet. 

So I have to examine how to write masculinity.  On one hand is the "muscular Christianity" that E.M. Forester commented on, with its homo-social prep-schools filled with fine young men learning Greek and honing their bodies with athletic games.  With the alternate-religion of the world, I think I can focus on the strong body, strong mind ethic to help preserve that old English Empire feel.  And since The Father and The Mother of the Quartet are equals, there's less pressure to have a "The spiritually manly man is the head of his household" morality.

Oscar Wilde
Wikimedia Commons

But at the opposite end of the historical definition of early twentieth century manliness is Oscar Wilde, The Aesthete.  In this time period, if one was a refined, nonathletic, aesthete, one was not a manly-man.  And Steampunk, the romanticized version of the industrial revolution, is firmly rooted on the Manly Man in the Steamworks; the Self-sufficient, Burly Explorer; the Civilized Marshall of the Inner-Brute.  The aesthete hadn't marshaled his inner-brute so much as banished it (if he ever had one to begin with).

Anyway... that's been what's peculating in the back of my head.  Now... onto writing the story.   And I think I'm going to try my hand at more Steampunk, if only to try different ways of queering it.

The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory

A while back I read The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, by Cynthia Eller (Chapter One excerpt: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/eller-myth.html).  I keep referencing it, and I realized I hadn't blogged about it much.


The basic gist of The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory is that the prehistoric record is such that no one can say with certainty anything about prehistoric people other than things like, "they left behind these ruins," or "they buried people this way," or "they produced these sculptures and drawings." Eller then goes on a point-by-point argument against the story of a golden, pre-historic age (roughly 5000 to 2500 BCE) where society was centered on women, in which women were revered for their mysterious life-giving powers and honored as incarnations of the great goddess, and which was subsequently somehow transformed into what is called "patriarchy."

Eller concludes that the story of a golden age of woman-centered society (especially a pan-European one spanning over 2000 years) is a myth which should not be treated as historical fact.  As a myth, Eller argues that it is neither helpful as a guide for how women and men conceptualize their self-perceptions of gender and how the genders relate (her view is that the myth engenders sexism by heightening the differences between male and female), nor is the myth of prehistoric matriarchy required as a template from which to model a future society that has reached feminist goals (since it's a myth, it's not a history we're doomed to repeat; let's move on to equality).  She concludes, however, that adherents of the story of a golden age of prehistoric matriarchy are unlikely to abandon their "passionate hope and religious faith" in the story.

Eller's tone is sarcastic in places, and I found myself saying "ouch!" after reading several passages.  I did wonder at times if she was using particularly silly sources (ala Philip Davis in Goddess Unmasked).  However, I would recommend The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory and I found it useful for generating the following questions:

• Does Harry Hay's story of the Qeddishim count as a "Golden Age of Male 'Homo-archy'?"
  
• Golden Age stories seem to feed into 'apocalyptic end-times,' 'after the revolution' or to 'boosting self-esteem' thinking; is there another way to incorporate them into a world view?
  
• As someone who is seeking the Divine Queer, is there such a thing as a "divine queer way of knowing?"  How would a story help to weave together our erotic, the spiritual, and mental lives -- and how would my story as a gay man be different from someone with a different gender and orientation?   Or, to put it another way, is a book like "Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-sex Love" (in the Eugene Library, 0974638838) going to be useful?

In applying The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory to my own experiences and observations as a gay man, I came up with the following:

In my experience, gay men have tried to seek myths of how gay men have functioned in various other cultures (for example, Greek, Japanese, First Nations).  The rational behind using other cultures as material for gay myths has been to bolster gay self-esteem by providing modern U.S. gay men with prototype gay ways of being.

These myths are unsatisfying to me because I am neither an aristocratic warrior nor an indigenous pre-industrial native.  And instead of synthesizing new cultural solutions to the question of what it means to be a gay man, it seems to me that there are many "Indian-wanna-bes" trying to heal their self-esteem issues by being something they aren't.

This is not to say that the myth of a prehistoric matriarchy would motivate women the same way that my gay male examples seem to motivate gay men.

There is also a "Golden Age" in American Gay Culture, which would have been around 1980 in New York City (post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS).  This golden age helps support the stereo-type of the urban gay male (think Will and Jack from Will and Grace and the Bravo TV show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy).  As evidence for my supposition that the gay golden age promotes stereotypes, I'd present the movie, Jeffry; and the novels An Arrow's Flight, by  Mark Merlis and Like People in History by Felice Picano.  These are mostly literary sources, and could be biased.

But - like the myths borrowed from other cultures - this golden age (at least as it is represented in cultural and literary sources) is not helpful to me because I am not a Castro Clone nor a Greenwich Village Artist.  The internal push-and-pull about personal identity and big city gay social expectations can be seen in the book Life Outside by Michaelangelo Signorile -- which basically blames Wall Street for seducing gay men into restrictive roles about what is "masculine" and "gay" -- think Tom of Finland. (Unfortunately, Signorile seems to have not read Starhawk, Niomi Wolf, nor an introductory statistics text.)  Signorile's solution was to suggest that gay men move to small cites and find mentors.

I should point out that I'm very lucky - I've never been institutionalized or beat-up physically for my orientation (although 1976 through 1983 were very rough years to be a nerd and perceived queer) .  And I'm very lucky to be maintaining a household with a loving partner.

So, to bring this back to  The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, I can empathize with Eller's written preferences for a history grounded in archeological evidence (as opposed to imagined or intuited myths), although I don't know how easily applicable an archeological history of people can be mapped onto today's culture.  Rather than fetishizing a place (such as Stonehenge or Isreal or Canterbury Cathedral or the Parthanon), focusing on prehistoric cultures seems to fetishize a particular time.

Eller argues that the story of a prehistoric matriarchy comes with strong expectations about what it means to be a woman (and by inference, a man) which set up restrictive gender roles. Given my experiences with the Golden Age of Gay New York City, I would have to agree with her.

But maybe I'm stuck in a pre-Hegelian modality - or perhaps I need to re-read a copy of Godel Escher Bach and practice writing "mu." 

Others have not been so amused as I have been with The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory and here are their reviews and critiques:

Review by Kristy Coleman: http://www.cynthiaeller.com/colemanreview_new.htm

 Eller's response to Coleman:  http://www.cynthiaeller.com/responsecoleman_new.htm

 Review by Joan Marler:  http://www.belili.org/marija/eller_response.html

 Comentary by Marguerite Rigoglioso:  http://www.belili.org/marija/rigoglioso.html

 Eller's response to Marler and Rigoglioso:  http://www.belili.org/marija/c_eller_response.html

 Review by Max Dashu: http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/eller.html

 Eller's response to Dashu:  http://www.cynthiaeller.com/responsedashu_new.htm

Signs...

Mark and I were having a conversation and somehow the Jontue perfume commercials came up. "Oh, I used to love those old commercials," I said. "That should have been Clue Number One [that I was gay]."

"You say that about everything," said Mark. "You have several 'Clue Number One's'."

After a few more exchanges, we agreed: there should be a list. And then, after some editing (Mark says to take out the things that were just "goofy"), the list got pared down. So here it is: The Official List of Events That Should Have Clued Me In (But Didn't):


1968: Saturday morning I would turn on Johnny Quest. Sure, I liked Bandit the dog. And the over-dramatic danger music was a plus, too. Okay, and the mechanical spy spider that tried to steal the secret of the para-power ray! But I think what kept me coming back every weekend was Race Bannon. Maybe it was the sharp red shirt with the buttons up the side. Or maybe it was the fact that Mr. Bannon seemed to lose his shirt about as much as...

1970: Captain Kirk. Okay; it's true. Seeing William Shatner's sweaty bare chest made me all tingly inside -- which was very confusing because I really had no idea what I was feeling and also all that tingling was a little overwhelming. I guess I was losing my sanity.

1971: There was something both frightening and oddly compelling about Burt Ward and Adam West on the old Batman TV Series; especially when they were tied up in Yet Another Crazy Super-Villain Trap. And now that I'm thinking about it, The Riddler's (Frank Gorshin's) body suit was doing something for me, too.

c. 1972: You remember the commercial for Irish Spring that starts out with two brawny guys wrestling shirtless? Manly, yes; and I liked it, too (but I didn't know why).

c. 1974: One Easter, I must have tried to watch The Ten Commandments in its entirety. Hot sweaty guys building stone monuments, dancing girls, hot sweaty guys rowing boats, the sybaritic splendor of Hollywood's Egypt, hot sweaty guys in kilts, armbands, chest straps and jewelry. "Oh Moses, Moses, Moses!" it made an impression. The movie became a yearly guilty pleasure every Easter -- for reasons I wouldn't figure out for decades (I mean, come on; Charlston Heston?).

1977:  Really not understanding what all the fuss about Cheryl Tiegs and Farrah Fawcett-Majors was all about.  But kind of liking Kate Jackson.

c. 1981: When describing a high school girl, "Oh, she's got pretty hair."  And meaning it.

c. 1983: Noticing that the kind of woman I was attracted to tended to be tall, thin, and not buxom.

c. 1984: During a Reed College Renn Faire, we were watching the old 1960's Batman Movie (Adam West and Burt Ward, again!)  An auditorium of Reedies started hooting when Lee Meriwether appeared in her Catwoman suit.  For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what everyone was carrying on about, and had to be informed just what upper-torso body parts Ms. Meriwether possessed which "looked sharp enough to slice bread with."   -- In a slightly related issue, it took me something like two years before it dawned on me that I was supposed to be drooling over Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine (really?).

c. 1985: In one of those "Oh My God! It Burns My Eyes But I Can't Look Away" moments, I managed to catch The Beastmaster while channel surfing. I think it must have been during a PBS pledge drive and we wanted to watch Dr. Who instead. In any case, I found myself mesmerized by Marc Singer (The Beastmaster, Dar). Somewhere in the second half of the movie, viewers are treated to an overhead camera pan of our shirtless (of course) hero traveling upside-down along the underside of a kind of chain bridge. For what seems like a slo-mo eternity we watch Mr. Singer pull himself (one sweaty arm reaches out, a mighty hand grasps a length of chains, oiled pectorals contract, and... repeat!) farther along the chain links while a chorus of half-crazed animal-men (minions of the the evil wizard) grunt and try to pull him off of the bridge and into their cages. Oh, -- was there? -- I think there was hot lava or hot coals or something under the bridge. I was kind of too busy to notice.

c. 1991. I had traveled across the state with some friends to a Neo-Pagan Gathering in Madison, Wisconsin. It involved a lot of driving, and I had harped during the ritual. We (and other travelers) were offered crash-space in a barn, which we reached at midnight. As we were shuffling about in the barn's loft, a Sweet Young Neo-Pagan Lass looked at me, looked sideways, looked back and said, "Oohh! Do you need a place to sleep?" I think there might have been batting eyelashes and heaving bosoms here, but I honestly don't remember. "Oh. Oh," I said. "No, my sleeping bag is over here. Thanks. Goodnight." Only after the lights were out and I was drifting off did it occur to me that I was supposed to say "No", and then she was supposed to invite me to share her sleeping bag, and then....


There. Now it's official. I'm sure there's a few things that I've left off of this list. And I want to emphasize that during the seventies, at least, these little clues were feelings I couldn't verbalize or understand, and they didn't go much beyond feeling a little short of breath or vaguely thrilled. Looking back, I'm trying to tease out where naivety gives way to denial.... and that's another blog post.

Yearly Epiphany Musing

Epiphany is coming up. Every year at this time I think about the kind of graceless way I came out to my parents on the Feast of Epiphany, 1996.

Close on the heels of thinking about coming out to my parents is the process of coming out to myself. My orientation should have been obvious to me in 1976 (when I was in sixth grade), and again in 1983 (when I was a Reed freshman). Well, okay; now that I really think about it, Captain Kirk loosing his shirt in the late sixties and early seventies was compelling in a way that I couldn't articulate at the time. But, for various reasons, the process didn't really happen until 1993 (when I was 29 years old).

Over the years, various friends have mentioned, almost as asides, "Oh, John; we all figured you were gay." (The high school jocks jeering "gay-boy" at me and fellow dance class students don't count.) My response has always been between a bemused, "What?" and "Why was I the last one to know?" So this year I'm curious - when did you know; and if you knew in the eighties and nineties did you think I knew, or were you waiting for a moment of self-discovery, or something else ?

When John Dreams Wagner...

This is what I get for reading A.S. Byatt's entry from "How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors," which included a cover of Norse Mythology....


My sense is that this dream image occurred several times, or that the actions repeated from different dream perspectives. Sometimes I watched a stage with a Wagnerian-style opera on it. Sometimes I was in the opera.

On a traditional precenium stage, figures stood on small platforms before a cobalt blue and purple scrim. The platforms were difficult to see, so the figures appeared to be floating in the air. The precenium was blue shadows. Wavy bars of of yellow light passed like flames over random figures; it never illuminated more than half a face or part of an arm, and never for longer than a few seconds. The setting was the formless, disconnected chaos before the cosmos. People, animals, and irregular planes floated in a disconnected tableau.

Odin stood on a platform hanging in the middle of the stage. In the versions of the opera I was participating in, I was Odin's apprentice / assistant / Fricative (not quite the title used in the dream, but it works in waking narrative). I might have been Baldr (I don't know why). Other times I was in the audience watching.

My job was to urge Odin on his work while messaging his back and stomach to raise his heat or "frenzy" (again, not the right word, but neither is berserkergang). Sometimes I think we were both clothed; sometimes I think (only) I might have been shirtless, the spotlight making stage glitter sparkle on my white shoulders. (Cue pensive oboe and flute duet like an aurora over the string section.) I remember Odin's solid abdominal, back and shoulder muscles. In any case, we were on stage performing an opera. Because I was raising Odin's frenzy, I was getting hot as well, and I cried out in some kind of prophetic, erotic trance (no, I don't remember what I said).

At last, Odin reached out and grasped a cosmic serpent writhing over our heads. The flitting yellow lights focused on him. The serpent straightened and turned into Odin's rune-covered spear. (Cue orchestral surge led by the horn section, probably with kettle drums.) Stage left, the shadowy figures coalesced together; their strangely shaped platforms spinning around a common center to come together as a circle. Yellow and green light illuminated what was the Earth (or Midgaurd), with various heros standing on a circular platform. Odin and I stood in the center, at the top of a tree (which I can only assume was the World Tree). Other areas of the stage came together as locations from the Norse cosmology.

And I woke up with the overture to Tannhauser in my head.

No, I'm not usually drawn to Norse Mysteries. Yes, I went to bed asking myself for dream guidance. No, this isn't the first time I've drempt an erotic encounter with a deity. Yes, Jesus is a better kisser.

LGBT Pride Month

President Obama has proclaimed that June is LGBT Pride Month. So I guess I need to post my thoughts on same-sex marriage.

I see marriage as a ritual that builds a spiritual vehicle. The lovers involved are pledging not only to uphold and maintain each other, but to uphold and maintain the spiritual vehicle. Participating in a marriage is the process of building something larger than, and inclusive of, the participants. I think the usual phrase is called, "building a household."

Socially, for good or for ill, marriage is one of those milestones our society uses to judge if you are a Real Person or some kind of unhappy, unloved, juvenile delinquent.

Mark will probably say something wildly practical, like "marriage is doing the dishes for each other."

On the spiritual front, if a particular religious flavor wants to reserve the ritual of marriage to a certain set of people, well gee -- that's their religion. My preference is to reserve marriage to lovers -- emancipated adults able to choose whom they love.

However, in the USA, marriage is also a business contract. Straight married people receive all sorts of tax breaks prohibited to same-sex couples. Oregon's actually pretty nice about some credits; but if either Mark or I kick off, we do not receive the other's Social Security benefits because the Federal government does not recognize same-sex marriage partners. My health insurance, granted through Mark's employer, is a taxable benefit -- the same benefit would not be taxed were we straight and married.

And it doesn't stop there. Hardy Meyers, then acting Attorney General for Oregon, pointed out in an opinion a few years ago that children of same-sex couples are monetarily discriminated against by the government because of the sexual orientation of their parents. This makes them a minority class deserving of special protection -- which they don't get.

So. Yeah. It's Pride Month. You know what I think I'd like more than a proclamation? Or a parade? I'd like it if religions were left alone to have whatever religious marriage ceremonies they can come up with and I'd like it if all married couples had the same taxes regardless of the genders of the spouses involved. It'd be easy to do -- either give everyone the same tax breaks, or abolish marriage tax breaks.

I think this is the part where I'm supposed to conclude with, "Yes, We Can."