Harry Hay at the Sanctuary conception - 2006/09/03 22:48 This next historical writing concerns the early intent for creating a Sanctuary for Gay Men to explore their unique place and spirituality in their many societies,
as many of us feel being Gay is more that a collection of sex acts.
From "Nobody Gets Out of Here Alive"
By Steve Jackson
Article Published Mar 2, 2000
In part because of his conversations with Gourley and other young gay activists, Hay had decided to put in motion something he had been thinking about for some time. He called it A Spiritual Gathering for Radical Fairies, to take place in the desert near Tucson later that summer. It was the chance to examine the spiritual and political side of being gay, Hay said. He had been careful to choose each word for the event carefully: Spiritual, to emphasize that this was to be more than a party in the wilds; Gathering, which seemed to denote a coming together of equals; Radical, which Hay was always reminding Gourley meant "to the root," in that they would be exploring the root of their gayness apart from their sexuality; and Fairies, partly to "reclaim" a word that was derogatory when applied to gays, but also because it evoked images of the elusive, magical creatures of folklore.
The gathering of a couple hundred went off beautifully. Big on ceremony, queens were all over the "mud ritual" of worshiping Mother Earth by smearing their naked bodies with the stuff and dancing around in the warm Arizona air. Hay was so pleased with the outcome that he immediately put Gourley in charge ofplanning a second gathering for the following summer in the mountains of Colorado.
But danger was on the horizon. Its first warning came to Gourley after the spiritual gathering that fall.
He and his boyfriend at the time, an emergency-room physician, grew hallucinogenic mushrooms. They liked to take them before heading off to the bathhouses, which they viewed as the ultimate playgrounds. One night Gourley ate a new batch of the hallucinogens, more powerful than he was used to dealing with. Inside the bathhouse, he began freaking out and made his way to the outdoor part of the facility, hoping that cool air might help bring him down. But it only got worse.
Demons appeared, looking like gargoyles. They danced toward him, their long purple and pink tongues protruding from grinning mouths and distorted faces, their tentacles and hands reaching, grasping. They were everywhere, whichever way he turned. If they caught him, he thought he would surely die.
Gourley quickly left the bathhouse and rode his bike to the home of his best friend, Don Gorman. Gorman had a technique for bringing friends down from bad trips: He made them sit in a corner and peel an orange. If that didn't work, he made them peel another, until the concentration and isolation brought them back to the world.
The technique worked for Gourley, but he never again used recreational drugs -- not so much as a joint of marijuana. He eventually went back to the bathhouses, but he couldn't shake the idea that in an altered state of consciousness, he had picked up on some negative energy that had invaded the baths, evil spirits or bad karma. Something terrible was happening.
The cops were polite, if somewhat nervous. "We had some reports of nudity," explained one.
Pat Gourley tried not to smile. Three hundred gay men...running around in the forest...dancing to drums...and there was nudity? What a surprise!
The second Spiritual Gathering of Radical Fairies had gone off without a hitch -- or any cops -- until the fifth day of the convocation. Fortunately, most everybody had gone home, and the rest were obviously packing to leave; otherwise, the cops might have gotten an eyeful, and he'd be spending the afternoon bailing a bunch of irate fairies out of jail.
Not that the gathering, at a campsite near Buffalo Park, Colorado, had been one long orgy. Far from it. For a bunch of eccentric queens, they'd gotten down to some serious business.
Gourley had been put in charge of the local organizing team. He'd had to find the site, secure the permit from the forest service and rent two large tents for those who hadn't brought their own. He'd had to make sure that planning and buying breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks -- all vegetarian to please the widest range of tastes -- for 300 were covered, as well as arrange transportation from Denver (to keep down the car traffic at the site) and for those flying in from the far corners.
As local organizer, he was subjected to all sorts of advice on the agenda from Harry Hay and other movement luminaries such as Mitch Walker, who in the mid-'70s had written Men Loving Men (a gay equivalent of The Joy of Sex) and whose more philosophical book, Visionary Love, had just been released.
Hay had decided that the time was ripe for reviving one of the pet projects he had first envisioned decades earlier. The project, Gourley wrote in the pamphlet announcing the gathering, involved establishing a "permanent Sanctuary, through Community Land Trust, for all of us." Hay's vision was a gay homeland, a rural commune as self-sufficient as possible, almost Amish in austerity, though no one suggested that queens be told they would have to wear black. He wasn't advocating total separation from straight society -- that wasn't practical. Besides, it was his dream that someday straight society would recognize gays and lesbians for their contributions.
For decades Hay had argued that gays and lesbians were distinct peoples -- different genders entirely from their counterparts in the hetero world, a cultural minority that went back as far as time itself. In late-night conversations in Gourley's kitchen, they'd talked about the sanctuary as a place where gay men could withdraw for a time and wrestle with philosophical questions and ideas about presenting what they learned about themselves to the world outside. Maybe it would be in some sort of spiritual way, Hay said, noting that stereotypical or not, gays were often drawn to "helping professions." For example, gays traditionally had been attracted to the clergy and often assumed important roles in Native American religions. When they finally knew what they were about, Hay envisioned gays from the sanctuary offering their services to the rest of the world. Maybe as mediators to resolve issues, he mused.
Gourley liked the idea of going to the sanctuary himself. Maybe it was the old farm kid in him, but he saw himself working in the fields and participating in the great debates to feed both the bodies and the minds of his brothers. He wasn't quite as optimistic as Hay about straight society recognizing gays' attributes and welcoming them with open arms, but it was a nice dream.
For years the idea of a sanctuary had lain dormant in the mind of Hay, who thought the gay community was too absorbed in sexual liberation. But now he thought the second gathering would be the right forum to reveal his plan. Gourley had plenty of help from other activists such as Phil Nash and Tim Offutt, one of the rare "out" members of the gay black community, working out the logistics. His best friend, Don Gorman, who nearly a year earlier had brought him down out of the bad mushroom trip, did the art for the flier -- a mandala with its concentric rings depicting mountains, mushrooms, dancing stick figures and flying fairies tooting horns. For the front of the "tips" flier, he drew a man looking through a kaleidoscope at another mandala, a tribute to Hay and Burnside who, in Los Angeles during the Summer of Love, had owned a factory that made kaleidoscopes to sell to hippies. Of the two, Gourley was the more political and, if not for the balance Gorman brought to their friendship, could have easily tipped into reactionary politics, where everything is black and white and issues are placed over humanity. But Gourley could always count on Gorman's ability to put things into perspective. Oh, Blanche, sit down and do your nails, he'd say when Gourley climbed on his horse. But it was possibly what they didn't do that had the most profound effect on Gourley: Despite their closeness, they were never lovers. It wasn't about sex.
And while Gourley was fond of saying that he got his nursing degree from University Hospital and his "Ph.D. in Queerdom" from Harry Hay, he had a difficult time getting his mentor to discuss his concern about gays' hedonistic sexual behavior. Hay found discussions about sexual behavior counterproductive to his principle theme that being gay was more than "where you put your dick." He was fond of shocking listeners by declaring, with a twist on the old gay adage, "We have nothing in common with straight people except for what we do in bed." In one of the rare times he did discuss sexuality with Gourley, Hay noted that gay men's behavior had changed radically over the years: They now had more anal sex, in part because of the opportunity provided by the bathhouses.
That was one of the reasons Gourley noted on a flier for the gathering that "the fairies planning the gathering ask that there be no drug or alcohol use on the site." They wanted to remove the gathering -- physically and psychologically -- as far as possible from the party scene that defined the liberated gay lifestyle of the '70s.
The campsite permit forced them to limit the number of participants to 300, some of whom arrived in Denver early and headed for Gourley's home in Five Points, where Hay and Walker were soon leading discussions. The other participants arrived, coming from major metropolitan areas and small towns all over the country; there were even a few from Canada. All were taken to the fifteen-acre campsite at the end of a box canyon where Gourley's two tents were set up near a large fire pit.
The evenings were social and spiritual in nature. Taking their cue from the lesbians, who Gourley joked with friends were a "more highly evolved life form than gay men," there were a lot of pagan and wiccan influences in their rituals, a lot of evoking the "Great Mother" and worshiping nature. The weather -- which had been alternately cloudy and rainy -- put a damper on another mud ritual (making Gourley glad that he'd warned participants that at 8,000 feet, even in summer, it was a good idea to bring down coats and rain gear in addition to "your entire wardrobe of flowing non-hetero garb"). A big hit was the drumming and dancing, which reached its peak when Offutt appeared on a hillside one evening dressed from head to toe in a magnificent buckskin outfit, pounding on a large drum. Soon participants were dancing around the fire like wildmen.
The days had their hours for hiking, quiet contemplation and simply building a sense of community by networking with like-minded gay men from all over the country. There were, of course, several "fairy circles," in which the men would gather to discuss issues, some dressed in dresses and skirts or nothing at all. The workshops dealt with more serious matters. The idea of the gay sanctuary was a big hit and, while not everyone agreed on how best to go about it, the consensus was that the gay community needed to move beyond sex as the issue that defined gay culture both to themselves and the straight world. There were also discussions about health concerns and the relationship to the bathhouse scene.
as many of us feel being Gay is more that a collection of sex acts.
From "Nobody Gets Out of Here Alive"
By Steve Jackson
Article Published Mar 2, 2000
In part because of his conversations with Gourley and other young gay activists, Hay had decided to put in motion something he had been thinking about for some time. He called it A Spiritual Gathering for Radical Fairies, to take place in the desert near Tucson later that summer. It was the chance to examine the spiritual and political side of being gay, Hay said. He had been careful to choose each word for the event carefully: Spiritual, to emphasize that this was to be more than a party in the wilds; Gathering, which seemed to denote a coming together of equals; Radical, which Hay was always reminding Gourley meant "to the root," in that they would be exploring the root of their gayness apart from their sexuality; and Fairies, partly to "reclaim" a word that was derogatory when applied to gays, but also because it evoked images of the elusive, magical creatures of folklore.
The gathering of a couple hundred went off beautifully. Big on ceremony, queens were all over the "mud ritual" of worshiping Mother Earth by smearing their naked bodies with the stuff and dancing around in the warm Arizona air. Hay was so pleased with the outcome that he immediately put Gourley in charge ofplanning a second gathering for the following summer in the mountains of Colorado.
But danger was on the horizon. Its first warning came to Gourley after the spiritual gathering that fall.
He and his boyfriend at the time, an emergency-room physician, grew hallucinogenic mushrooms. They liked to take them before heading off to the bathhouses, which they viewed as the ultimate playgrounds. One night Gourley ate a new batch of the hallucinogens, more powerful than he was used to dealing with. Inside the bathhouse, he began freaking out and made his way to the outdoor part of the facility, hoping that cool air might help bring him down. But it only got worse.
Demons appeared, looking like gargoyles. They danced toward him, their long purple and pink tongues protruding from grinning mouths and distorted faces, their tentacles and hands reaching, grasping. They were everywhere, whichever way he turned. If they caught him, he thought he would surely die.
Gourley quickly left the bathhouse and rode his bike to the home of his best friend, Don Gorman. Gorman had a technique for bringing friends down from bad trips: He made them sit in a corner and peel an orange. If that didn't work, he made them peel another, until the concentration and isolation brought them back to the world.
The technique worked for Gourley, but he never again used recreational drugs -- not so much as a joint of marijuana. He eventually went back to the bathhouses, but he couldn't shake the idea that in an altered state of consciousness, he had picked up on some negative energy that had invaded the baths, evil spirits or bad karma. Something terrible was happening.
The cops were polite, if somewhat nervous. "We had some reports of nudity," explained one.
Pat Gourley tried not to smile. Three hundred gay men...running around in the forest...dancing to drums...and there was nudity? What a surprise!
The second Spiritual Gathering of Radical Fairies had gone off without a hitch -- or any cops -- until the fifth day of the convocation. Fortunately, most everybody had gone home, and the rest were obviously packing to leave; otherwise, the cops might have gotten an eyeful, and he'd be spending the afternoon bailing a bunch of irate fairies out of jail.
Not that the gathering, at a campsite near Buffalo Park, Colorado, had been one long orgy. Far from it. For a bunch of eccentric queens, they'd gotten down to some serious business.
Gourley had been put in charge of the local organizing team. He'd had to find the site, secure the permit from the forest service and rent two large tents for those who hadn't brought their own. He'd had to make sure that planning and buying breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks -- all vegetarian to please the widest range of tastes -- for 300 were covered, as well as arrange transportation from Denver (to keep down the car traffic at the site) and for those flying in from the far corners.
As local organizer, he was subjected to all sorts of advice on the agenda from Harry Hay and other movement luminaries such as Mitch Walker, who in the mid-'70s had written Men Loving Men (a gay equivalent of The Joy of Sex) and whose more philosophical book, Visionary Love, had just been released.
Hay had decided that the time was ripe for reviving one of the pet projects he had first envisioned decades earlier. The project, Gourley wrote in the pamphlet announcing the gathering, involved establishing a "permanent Sanctuary, through Community Land Trust, for all of us." Hay's vision was a gay homeland, a rural commune as self-sufficient as possible, almost Amish in austerity, though no one suggested that queens be told they would have to wear black. He wasn't advocating total separation from straight society -- that wasn't practical. Besides, it was his dream that someday straight society would recognize gays and lesbians for their contributions.
For decades Hay had argued that gays and lesbians were distinct peoples -- different genders entirely from their counterparts in the hetero world, a cultural minority that went back as far as time itself. In late-night conversations in Gourley's kitchen, they'd talked about the sanctuary as a place where gay men could withdraw for a time and wrestle with philosophical questions and ideas about presenting what they learned about themselves to the world outside. Maybe it would be in some sort of spiritual way, Hay said, noting that stereotypical or not, gays were often drawn to "helping professions." For example, gays traditionally had been attracted to the clergy and often assumed important roles in Native American religions. When they finally knew what they were about, Hay envisioned gays from the sanctuary offering their services to the rest of the world. Maybe as mediators to resolve issues, he mused.
Gourley liked the idea of going to the sanctuary himself. Maybe it was the old farm kid in him, but he saw himself working in the fields and participating in the great debates to feed both the bodies and the minds of his brothers. He wasn't quite as optimistic as Hay about straight society recognizing gays' attributes and welcoming them with open arms, but it was a nice dream.
For years the idea of a sanctuary had lain dormant in the mind of Hay, who thought the gay community was too absorbed in sexual liberation. But now he thought the second gathering would be the right forum to reveal his plan. Gourley had plenty of help from other activists such as Phil Nash and Tim Offutt, one of the rare "out" members of the gay black community, working out the logistics. His best friend, Don Gorman, who nearly a year earlier had brought him down out of the bad mushroom trip, did the art for the flier -- a mandala with its concentric rings depicting mountains, mushrooms, dancing stick figures and flying fairies tooting horns. For the front of the "tips" flier, he drew a man looking through a kaleidoscope at another mandala, a tribute to Hay and Burnside who, in Los Angeles during the Summer of Love, had owned a factory that made kaleidoscopes to sell to hippies. Of the two, Gourley was the more political and, if not for the balance Gorman brought to their friendship, could have easily tipped into reactionary politics, where everything is black and white and issues are placed over humanity. But Gourley could always count on Gorman's ability to put things into perspective. Oh, Blanche, sit down and do your nails, he'd say when Gourley climbed on his horse. But it was possibly what they didn't do that had the most profound effect on Gourley: Despite their closeness, they were never lovers. It wasn't about sex.
And while Gourley was fond of saying that he got his nursing degree from University Hospital and his "Ph.D. in Queerdom" from Harry Hay, he had a difficult time getting his mentor to discuss his concern about gays' hedonistic sexual behavior. Hay found discussions about sexual behavior counterproductive to his principle theme that being gay was more than "where you put your dick." He was fond of shocking listeners by declaring, with a twist on the old gay adage, "We have nothing in common with straight people except for what we do in bed." In one of the rare times he did discuss sexuality with Gourley, Hay noted that gay men's behavior had changed radically over the years: They now had more anal sex, in part because of the opportunity provided by the bathhouses.
That was one of the reasons Gourley noted on a flier for the gathering that "the fairies planning the gathering ask that there be no drug or alcohol use on the site." They wanted to remove the gathering -- physically and psychologically -- as far as possible from the party scene that defined the liberated gay lifestyle of the '70s.
The campsite permit forced them to limit the number of participants to 300, some of whom arrived in Denver early and headed for Gourley's home in Five Points, where Hay and Walker were soon leading discussions. The other participants arrived, coming from major metropolitan areas and small towns all over the country; there were even a few from Canada. All were taken to the fifteen-acre campsite at the end of a box canyon where Gourley's two tents were set up near a large fire pit.
The evenings were social and spiritual in nature. Taking their cue from the lesbians, who Gourley joked with friends were a "more highly evolved life form than gay men," there were a lot of pagan and wiccan influences in their rituals, a lot of evoking the "Great Mother" and worshiping nature. The weather -- which had been alternately cloudy and rainy -- put a damper on another mud ritual (making Gourley glad that he'd warned participants that at 8,000 feet, even in summer, it was a good idea to bring down coats and rain gear in addition to "your entire wardrobe of flowing non-hetero garb"). A big hit was the drumming and dancing, which reached its peak when Offutt appeared on a hillside one evening dressed from head to toe in a magnificent buckskin outfit, pounding on a large drum. Soon participants were dancing around the fire like wildmen.
The days had their hours for hiking, quiet contemplation and simply building a sense of community by networking with like-minded gay men from all over the country. There were, of course, several "fairy circles," in which the men would gather to discuss issues, some dressed in dresses and skirts or nothing at all. The workshops dealt with more serious matters. The idea of the gay sanctuary was a big hit and, while not everyone agreed on how best to go about it, the consensus was that the gay community needed to move beyond sex as the issue that defined gay culture both to themselves and the straight world. There were also discussions about health concerns and the relationship to the bathhouse scene.
posted by:
|
Portland
|
