GAY ASSIMILATION — THEN AND NOW

TODAY'S GAY WISDOM

GAY ASSIMILATION — THEN AND NOW:
THE GAY COMMUNITY IN CRISIS

Editor's Note: In 1979 Los Angeles' Gay liberationist and community organizer Don Kilhefner wrote an article entitled Gay People At A Critical Crossroads: Assimilation or Affirmation? Below are selected excerpts from that historic document followed by a commentary by Kilhefner on the article and his insights on Gay assimilation thirty years after the essay was written and how it is impacting our community — negatively, he suggests. The full essay can be found in Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning edited by Mark Thompson and published by White Crane Books.

EXCERPTS FROM GAY PEOPLE AT A CRITICAL CROSSROADS:
ASSIMILATION OR AFFIRMATION

By Don Kilhefner

Invocation

There was a time when you were not a slave,
remember that.
You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember…
You say there are no words to describe it.
You say it does not exist.
But remember. Make an effort to remember.
Or, failing that, invent.
Monique Wittig

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These notes are not about the historical roots of the American Gay movement. Instead, they address an increasingly critical, but virtually ignored, dilemma faced by Gay people — our assimilation into the mainstream versus our enspiritment as a people. I am talking about nothing less than reinventing ourselves as Gay people.

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Today, regardless of the Gay movement's sociopolitical rhetoric, homosexual and Gay are virtually synonymous (for a brief period between 1970 and 1975 this was not true). No matter how liberated and progressive our self-image as Gay men might be, most of us still lead our lives within the matrix of the Myth of the Homosexual—albeit, on subtle levels sometimes. Our so-called Gay identity is still largely hetero-male derived and defined. For example, the plethora of conferences in recent years aimed at "developing a positive Gay identity" are really aimed at learning more positive ways of coping with the homosexual myth structure in which we still find ourselves enmeshed. They have very little to do with discovering our true-self identity as a people. Our minds have been colonized well.

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When we try to share with our dominant society just who we think we are as Gay people, we find ourselves simply feeding back to them permutated definitions of the sexual orientation myth they originally fed to us. This process, of course, is not unique to Gay men. Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology, for example, provides a brilliant analysis of a similar predicament in relation to the emergence of a truly woman-centered identity for women.

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We now stand at the metaphorical fork in the road. I refer to one path as Gay assimilation. It is based on the positive Myth of the Homosexual, a largely unexamined, underlying assumption that "we're no different from anybody else except for what we do in bed." Other than our choice of sex partners, we're just like heterosexuals.
For Gay assimilationists, civil rights and acceptance by heterosexuals are panaceas. Personal identities and life plans are based on heterosexual models of respectability and upward class mobility. Non-Gay, Caucasian physical attributes and behavior are emulated. For the Gay assimilationist, political success means Gay people becoming as power-oriented, manipulative, and competitive as hetero men in playing the game of electoral and community politics. At present the Gay movement and media are dominated by Gay assimilationists. And it is one of the reasons we can't trust our leaders.

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When I am around Gay assimilationists, I often feel like I'm associating with straight men, and I'm reminded of Gay author James Baldwin's warning that when a minority group attempts to assimilate, it always does so totally on the terms of the dominant culture. And Gay men are being accepted by hetero culture to the extent that they look, behave and think just like straight men, in the process becoming dispirited people.

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At the metaphorical fork in the road where we now find ourselves, an alternative possibility is available to us as Gay men. I refer to it as the path of Gay enspiritment. It is less well surveyed at this point, but across the country, this alternative is increasingly being explored by a new generation of Gay men, many of whom had ventured down the Gay assimilation road, only to find the price too high for their souls.

This other possibility says that there is a reality to being Gay that is radically different from being straight (note: different not better or worse). This Gay reality is inside of us and it is substantial and meaningful. It is real. We can feel it in our hearts and in our guts. And it has nothing to do with hetero mythologies, either negative or positive, about what it means to be Gay.

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As Gay men continue to reclaim our cultural and spiritual history outside the Myth of the Homosexual, we are discovering a rich historical lineage pointing toward the current emergence of Gay consciousness. During the past century this Gay spirit has been identified, nurtured, deepened and passed on by an incredible line of Gay mystics and visionaries—Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Gerald Heard and Harry Hay, to mention one such lineage.

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Carpenter's far-reaching observations about the unique functional roles of Gay people in society have recently been reiterated and enlarged upon by Harvard's E.O. Wilson, the founder of the new academic field of sociobiology. In his On Human Nature, Wilson concludes: "There is a strong possibility that homosexuality is a distinctive beneficent behavior that evolved as an important element of early human social organization. Homosexuals may be the genetic carriers of some of mankind's most altruistic impulses."

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Harry Hay and this writer, following the pioneering efforts of Arthur Evans and others, have made an important breakthrough work in Gay consciousness by reclaiming a faerie archetype to probe at the mystery. At 1979's seminal Spiritual Gathering for Radical Faeries, nearly two hundred Gay men from all over North America found their way to a remote spot in the Arizona desert to experience a brief taste of true-self identity. They were invited "to tear off the ugly green frog skin of hetero-male imitation to reveal the beautiful Faerie Prince hidden beneath."

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For a long time Gays have been trying to minimize our differences from heteros as an act of survival. But now, for the first time in history, Gay people are being urged to begin maximizing our differences from straights as an act of love—to ourselves and to them.
Maximizing our differences does not mean us versus them. It is not a call for Gay separatism and elitist groupings. It does mean, however, that Gay people must begin a radical new process of self-discovery that starts with what is inside of us; we must begin to discover who we really are; and we must begin inventing a language capable of revealing these essential differences to our dominant culture.
At a time when hetero-male culture has become lethal to the continued survival of our species and other beings on this planet, what greater act of loving kindness could Gay people perform? This is a contribution Gays have been making all along. Now, however, there is the potential for doing our dharmic dance with a level of awareness and compassion never before available either to Gays or straights.

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We must learn to honor, not hide, our being different; affirm and celebrate our Gayness in original and playful ways; acknowledge a rich hidden heritage both within and outside of us; and find new models to explain the body of information and intuitive knowledge we have been carrying for a long time but that had no way to get out.

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So, my evocation to Gay people is to keep moving beyond the Myth of the Homosexual. Understand that being Gay is not the same thing as being homosexual. A new wave in Gay liberation is forming. In deep and profound ways, none of us has really "come out" yet.

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THEN AND NOW - PART 2:


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TODAY'S GAY WISDOM

THE GAY COMMUNITY IN CRISIS: Commentary on "Gay People at a Critical Crossroads:

Assimilation or Affirmation" Thirty Years Later

By Don Kilhefner

"Community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another. Community is the fruit of our capacity to make the interests of others more important than our own. The question, therefore, is not `How can we make community?' but `How can we develop and nurture giving hearts?'"

Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey
Bread for the Journey

In October 1979, after I had returned from the first "Spiritual Gathering for Radical Faeries," which Harry Hay and I had organized in the beautiful Sonora desert of Southern Arizona east of Tucson, I was contacted by Christopher Street West, the organization that sponsors Los Angeles' Gay Pride Parade and Carnival every June, to write an article for the slick, glossy program it prints each year. After spending a week in the desert with nearly 200 Radical Faeries from all over North America, I was on fire with Gay spirit — flames shooting out the tips of my fingers and every orifice of my body. Of course, I would gladly write an article for Gay Pride on what I thought was the most important issue facing us as Gay people at the time — Gay assimilation vs. Gay enspiritment. Thirty years later it still is. You cannot have both at the same time. It is an impossibility. It is either one or the other. Just like today we cannot have American democracy and American imperialism at the same time. It's an impossibility.

The Crossroads article thirty years ago was based largely on workshops I had been doing with Gay men since 1975 at the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Los Angeles (now the Gay and Lesbian Center—"Community" and "Services" having been erased from its name by assimilationists in the early 1990's) named Gay Voices and Visions: The Enspiritment of Gay Politics/The Politics of Gay Enspiritment. I had gathered together all the Gay visionary literature I could get my faggoty hands on beginning with Walt Whitman and including Edward Carpenter, Gerald Heard (writing under the pseudonym D. B. Vest in homophile publications) , Harry Hay et al., culled the evolutionary biology and sociobiology literature about us at the time, and also rounded up the other usual suspects. Between 1975 and 1979 — week after week, workshop after workshop — Gay men read this literature together in Los Angeles. And the literature soon began reading them. Like a white dove coming from the invisible world, pecking on their hearts, cooing in their ears, asking them to remember — something was brought alive in them. They experienced that Gay consciousness was real. It was intellectually and spiritually exciting and a new type of Gay consciousness- raising group was being birthed.

Shortly after submitting the article in late 1979 I received a phone call from Christopher St. West (CSW) telling me that they had decided not to print the article. CSW was angry with me. They felt the article was fantasy on my part and Gay people simply would not be able to understand what I was saying. The sad irony of this, of course, was that I had played a central role in organizing the first two Gay Pride marches in Los Angeles in 1970 and 1971. It was felt, however, that the article really did not have much to do with celebrating Gay Pride and it really was not about Gay people and the Gay community—and, if it was, it was much too radical to print. [The word radical derives from the Latin word radicale meaning "root" — thus a radical, in the true sense of the word, is one who gets to the root of things, who has depth in understanding. I am a Jungian Radical Psychologist, i.e., a Jungian Depth Psychologist. Radical healing means deep healing.]

By 1979 largely middle-class Gay assimilationists were beginning to take over the community that had been created by the radical Gay liberation movement during the past decade and often they were embarrassed by their radical roots. By then Gay Pride marches had become parades; Gay demonstrations against oppression were becoming carnivals; a marketplace of ideas was turning into a marketing niche. Increasingly, with startling speed, Gay men could not remember any more. It was as if Tinker Bell had flown over the United States sprinkling faerie dust and saying that Gay people should not think or remember who they are and from where they came. Increasingly, there was little awareness by the organizers of or the attendees at these Pride events that they were paying respect to those who had gone before them and honoring a social and political revolution, of major global proportions, that had been fought on their behalf. [Recently, on returning to me a copy of the first documentary ever done on the Gay Liberation movement in 1970 — Ken Robinson's Some Of Your Best Friends — a young Gay man angrily said to me: "Why hasn't anyone ever told me about this history! This is something I can be proud of!"] Gay Pride events became just another party with marketing opportunities. It was not too long thereafter that some Radical Faeries, alas, I am sad to say, minus the word radical, turned into common fairies—lots of glitter, little substance. In my last conversation with Harry Hay before he died, he deeply lamented the deteriorating state of affairs. Gay assimilationist triviality was raising its shallow head.

Shortly thereafter my friend Mark Thompson asked if he could use the Crossroads article and the readings I had assembled for the Gay Voices and Visions workshops for a book he was beginning to edit which became Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning (White Crane Books), an important and groundbreaking statement about enspiritment by Gay men.

Since 1979 the pace of Gay assimilation has picked up tremendous speed, and with the advent of the extreme right-wing Reagan Revolution it has become the dominant political and social ideology of the Gay community. Community-building, grassroots activism, and the exploration of Gay identity became dirty words; now individual financial achievement, checkbook activism and Gay bourgeois conformity reign. I draw your attention to an important article by nationally-syndicat ed columnist Gregory Rodriguez on the Op-Ed page of the Los Angeles Times titled "Gay — The New Straight" (November 5, 2007) and my Op/Ed response to Rodriguez in the Times (December 5, 2007). Let me hasten to add that I have no interest in demonizing Gay assimilationists per se. I am interested, however, in commenting on the phenomenology of Gay assimilation and how it is impacting our community—extremely negatively, I suggest.

Hey! What's Happening?

What has been the price we have had to pay for mindlessly allowing, and maybe even participating in, Gay assimilation? One price is that very little is happening in the Gay community today except for endless parties and fundraisers. Assimilationists will say we are basically just like heterosexuals except for our choice of sex partners (Harry would say: "We're just like hets when it comes to sex, and it most other ways we are different"). Assimilationists act as if we already have an identity (homosexual) and with cybersex and hookups, who needs a community or even an intellectual life. A Gay leader in Los Angeles recently opined that Chief Joseph was a Supreme Court judge. Evolutionary biology informs us that the basic function of heterosexuals is the reproductive survival of our species. The most essential question for us at present is: What is the evolutionary function of Gay people? What are Gay people for? To mimic heterosexuals? I don't think so. Otherwise, evolutionarily- speaking, we would have gone down the drainpipe of history long ago.

Inherent in Gay assimilation theory and practice is the disappearance of the Gay community and Gay identity, and it is happening all across the country. In a front page article in the New York Times (10/30/07) entitled "Gay Enclaves Face Prospect of Being Passé," the reporter writes about "a waning sense of belonging that is also being felt in Gay enclaves across the nation, from Key West, Fla., to West Hollywood, as they struggle to maintain cultural relevance in the face of gentrification. " The Times says you are no longer a community but an "enclave." They get it wrong when they say the problem is "gentrification. " The problem is Gay assimilation.

It saddens me tremendously today when energized young Gay men want to know where they can go to become actively and constructively involved in the community. For the first time since the 1980's I have no place toward which to point them. It tears me apart when intelligent young Gay men tell me they have to "dumb it down" to be part of the Gay community. I have a hunch this is true in your community as well.

Now You See It, Now You Don't

Another price we are paying for Gay assimilation is that we are becoming invisible again. Please, hold off on the "Will and Grace argument." It's no longer on the air. Will and Grace had about as much relationship to Gay peoples' lives as Liberace had to do with heterosexuality (to his everlasting glory, he won a libel case in England when a journalist accused him of being a "homosexual" — now that's chutzpah). Gay artist and filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, observing what's happening with our portrayal in the media, recently fumed about contemporary assimilationists, "…who seem to have no problem being represented in Stepin Fetchit shows like Will and Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy as bourgeois, shallow, materialistic and vain, obsessed with appearance and conspicuous consumption" (And the Bland Played On, Nerve.com). We have become entertainment for the dominant corporate/entertain ment/consumer culture. With the exception of the assimilationists' same-sex marriage agenda, we are not making hard news in any significant ways.

In the all-night dialogues I used to have with Harry Hay when we lived together during the early Radical Faerie years (he would stayed up all night reading, listening to music or writing; would go to bed when the sun came up and sleep until the mid-afternoon) , he often warned that political winds can change quickly and what was bestowed on a minority group one year with media access and media portrayals can be taken away quickly the next by the dominant culture. History is replete with examples. Weimar Jews, of course, immediately come to mind.

Let me give you a current example of increased Gay invisibility in Los Angeles. News of the Gay community here has virtually disappeared from the pages of the Los Angeles Times with the exception a few and far between same-sex marriage updates when they cannot be avoided. I also read the New York Times and it appears the same is true for the East coast. The recent California ruling giving constitutional "equal protection" status to Gay marriages naturally increased media attention briefly but died off quickly [A New York Times article (6/15/08) investigating three years of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts reports that nearly 70% of the marriages are by Lesbians and continues to substantiate for me that same-sex marriage is largely a Lesbian-led, not Gay male, issue. I was emotionally overwhelmed last April at the end of the Gay Men's Forum in Los Angeles when, in closing, we went around the room and stated what we thought the agenda of the Gay community should be for the next twenty years. Few mentioned marriage. But the depth and breath of our brothers' agenda restored my faith in Gay men's dreaming and visioning for their community.].

I arranged a lunch recently with a city editor of the Los Angeles Times to ask why we had become invisible again — I was curious. In 1970 I played an important role in the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front's project to take over sparsely-populated Alpine County in Northern California and establish the first openly-Gay government in history there. Then Governor Ronald Reagan called a news conference threatening to call out the California National Guard to stop us, and the Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, NBC Nightly News, etc. were forced to cover Gay Liberation as a political movement — which was our intention — instead of treating us as a medical issue and sending its medical reporter to our news conferences like the Los Angeles Times did. When I asked the Times City Editor why we were invisible again, he replied, rather arrogantly I thought, that he simply did not need to cover the Gay community anymore and, in any case, he felt nothing newsworthy seemed to be happening there, just endless social events of one type or another — nothing of substance.

Hey Brother, Can You Spare Ten Thousand Bucks?

Another place we pay a high price for Gay assimilation is the weakening of our Gay political power and integrity as a community. Could you imagine the Jewish community (or any other politically and socially aware minority group for that matter) holding a special dinner honoring and praising President Bill Clinton after he had issued a presidential order stating that no Jews can reveal they are Jews and they must act as if they are gentiles in the U.S. military? If their Jewishness is uncovered, they will be discharged [12,000 Gay men and women so far]. And, further, only gentiles can be married as dictated by the Defense of Marriage Act for which Clinton actively lobbied and signed into law? Do you think Jews would honor Clinton? I don't think so. They would have protested this injustice loudly, vehemently and intelligently. But the Gay assimilationists threw a "thank you" dinner for Clinton. They are so hungry for political acceptance by heterosexuals — rather than self-acceptance — they will sell their souls to the highest bidder. And that is exactly what the Gay assimilationist political claque has become — the cash cow of two political parties neither one of which really wants us otherwise. Gay Republicans still need to use the back door of the GOP when their bagmen deliver the loot. Ask McCain and Obama about their positions on same-sex marriage. McCain says "no!" with the loudspeaker turned to high volume. Obama sounds like a theologian, not a constitutional law professor, with his nuanced and convoluted elocution. Are their positions any different from Clinton's fifteen years ago?

Coors Whore Award — Who's Next?

We pay a high price for Gay assimilation with the eroding of the grassroots support for and the integrity of our community institutions. Here in Los Angeles not too long ago, right-of-center assimilationists clandestinely got the West Hollywood City Council to honor the Coors Brewing Co. for its hiring policies regarding Gay people (as a marketing ploy on Coors behalf). Coors then gave $15,000 — chump change — to Outfest: The Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Los Angeles, trumpeting the City Council resolution and plastering West Hollywood with banners crowing Outfest was sponsored by Coors (trying to give the impression the Coors Boycott — the most successful in Gay history — was over, which it is not). The Coors Boycott Committee raised holy hell. It is a well-documented fact that stocks and profits from the Coors Brewing Co., a family-owned business, are being funneled into Coors' Castle Rock Foundation that funds extreme right-wing homophobic organizations. These organizations constitute the Gay-hate coalition in this country and they are out to destroy every advance Gay people have made since 1969.

The Gay Tavern Guild here responded by re-stating its support for the boycott — since 1978 not a single Gay bar in Los Angeles sells Coors. After exhaustive research and public hearings on the subject (plus two debates between Coors' employee Mary Cheney and me before the Stonewall Democratic Club and the ACLU) both the Stonewall Democratic Club and the City Council of West Hollywood endorsed the Coors Boycott, asking Gay people not to feed the hand that bites them. After Morris Kight and I provided Outfest with the facts of the matter, its leadership agreed not to accept Coors money in the future. In every case, when Gay people have the full story on Coors funding, not just the Coors public relations/marketing spin, they endorse the Coors Boycott. Yet, even today, Gay community newspapers carry lucrative, sophisticated, full-page, color ads for the Coors Brewing Co. and the Gay and Lesbian Association Against Defamation (GLAAD), of all organizations, for Christ sake, not so long ago accepted money from Coors as one of the sponsors of its banquet in New York City. Hello GLAAD. Hello New York City. The lights are on. Is anyone at home? Is anyone tending the store?

Several years ago the Coors Boycott Committee met with the GLAAD board of directors to discuss the problem. As Hashem is my witness, their Gay assimilationist board just did not get that GLAAD should not accept money from one of the primary oppressors of Gay people and did all kinds of transparent intellectual acrobatics to justify taking Coors' money. I was stunned. It was like talking to fourth graders caught with their hand in the cookie jar. They refused to even discuss the anti-Gay funding of Coors' Castle Rock Foundation. To them, all money was good money. GLAAD was being coached by the Wittek and Combs public relations firm, run by two assimilationist Gay men in Washington, D.C., who were on the Coors payroll at the time. At the end of the discussion, seeing that GLAAD would not return Coors' money, I presented its president with the "Coors Whore Award" — a beautiful, full color, poster size, framed drawing showing a golden cockroach with a bottle of Coors in one hand and with his dick in the other hand pissing on a rainbow flag. GLAAD is not the exception; it is the rule among major Gay organizations. Gay assimilation is having a corrupting and corroding effect on the integrity and accountability to Gay people by our major community organizations.

In his Pali discourses, Gautama Buddha taught there are times when anger is in the dharma — exactly what the situation naturally calls for (like the uprising led by Buddhist monks in Myanmar recently). Moses, Jesus and Mohammed spoke and acted likewise. What has happened to Gay men? Why are they not angry with what is happening to them and their community? Why are Gay men silent? As Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us: "Our lives begin to end the day we become `silent' about things that matter" (Eternal Vigilance,1967) .

Take It To The Center Of The City

I was communicating with Toby Johnson recently, sharing with him that there is a line in The Odyssey that has always caught my attention. The Odyssey is the great archetypal story in Western literature about the father-son mysteries of the soul. At it is beginning, Telemachus is lamenting not having a father. His father, Odysseus, departed when he was a baby to fight the Trojan War and he had been gone 20 years. On his departure Odysseus, however, had placed Telemachus under the tutelage of Mentor through whom Athena speaks. Mentor was consoling Telemachus and telling him that in his father hunger lamentations he was finding his voice as a man. And then Mentor/Athena says to him: "And when you have found your voice you must take it into the center of the city."

I respectfully suggest, beloved brothers, that is the task that is staring us in the face right now vis-à-vis Gay assimilation. For all of you who have been laboring in the vineyards of Gay spirit and Gay consciousness at the edge of the village—it is time now to take your voice to the center of the city. You have been slowly finding your voice, sometimes in terrible isolation and lack of brotherly succor. I hear the voice you have found in the books, articles, poems, websites, and blogs you are writing and the gatherings you have been organizing at the edge of the city. And the center of our Gay cities and villages are hungry for the food of Gay spirit and consciousness after decades of Gay assimilationist pretentiousness, self-alienation and empty calories. "And when you have found your voice you must take it to the center of the city." The edge of the village must stop talking only to the edge of the village. The edge of the village, where so many dimensions of Gay soul are gestated and midwived, must take its newly found voice to the center of the city. Gay soul making and the communal and political evolution of our people demands it.

There is a critical need to create a new frontier of Gay consciousness as we move past the present wreckage of the Gay assimilationists (remembering always that they are also our brothers and we must truly be our brother's keeper). A frontier is a growing or expanding edge. Individuals, if they are psychospiritually and psychophysically alive, will have a growing edge. And communities and nations also have a growing edge. It is where the new, the challenging, the disturbing, the dangerous, the impossible is being constellated. It is the place where our lives, often unwillingly, move forward into the great unknown. The frontier is the most exciting and frightening place to be.

And as my fingers press the last keys of this commentary, the last notes of a J. S. Bach cantata are playing synchronistically on KUSC-Los Angeles. Its name: "I go and seek with longing."

Don Kilhefner, Ph.D., played a pioneering role in the creation of the Gay Liberation movement. He is also co-founder of Los Angeles' Gay and Lesbian Center, Van Ness Recovery House, Gay Men's Medicine Circle and numerous other organizations in the Gay community including (with Harry Hay) the Radical Faeries, an international Gay spirituality and consciousness movement. He writes a column titled Edging Out: Exploring the Frontiers of Gay Consciousness for Frontiers, Southern California's leading Gay newspaper. He is a Jungian psychologist in West Hollywood. Don can be reached at donkilhefner@sbcglobal.net .

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