An Overly Bullish Report on Bears
To the Editor:
The presence of Jeff Mann’s article, “Bear Culture 101,” in the GLR (Sept.-Oct. 2010) seems reflective of how the bear subculture is ambivalently enmeshed within mainstream gay culture.
At one point, having earlier affirmed that bears make the GLBT community more inclusive, Mann says he doesn’t relate to the world depicted in The Advocate or Out magazine. Yet here he is writing for a comparably gay mainstream, non-bear venue, GLR, albeit as a kind of teaching exercise about bears for the uninitiated. His mention of The Advocate as such, as producing “slick article after slick article,” sits awkwardly alongside his mention of former Advocate book editor Richard Labonté as a bear he admires. Similarly awkward is his reference to Judith Butler, not a name you’d expect to encounter in bear discourse.
Compounding the awkwardness, what has seemed more exclusive to the bear world—an embracing of masculinity—has now extended a lot further into mainstream gay culture. Bearspeak (“woof,” “grrrr”) and bear paraphernalia (caps, tats, T’s) are no longer any more surprising to encounter in any mainstream gay community venue, including in The Advocate or Out, than is a leather wristband, vest, or nipple rings. In this sense, and in view of Mann’s own acknowledgment that “most LGBT folks by now seem to know the basics about bears,” “Bear 101” seems unnecessarily didactic and rather dated.
In short, it seems more persuasive and appropriate to think of bears as becoming increasingly integrated with, rather than as growing apart from, the greater gay community. It seems likely that the bear subculture, like most subcultures, will continue to be absorbed into the mainstream, perhaps to the extent of that ultimate trait of masculinity: self-effacement.
In the bigger picture, the gay community has gone from being more feminist to being more masculinist. To me personally, it seems a positive development that gay men are now more inclined to explore and embrace masculinity, which seemed to me to be pathologically repressed in the pre-bear era. It also seems reasonable to me to affirm that just as we’ve gained knowledge of ourselves and our world from the experience of the leather subculture that preceded and stimulated the bear movement, we can affirm bear experience and culture, and appreciate the various ways it reflects and refracts our lives and values. What broader historical perspectives bears and leatherfolk will become part of remains to be seen.
Lawrence D. Mass, New York City
Radical Faeries: Kudos and a Correction
To the Editor:
I just want to write to you to say how much I loved Don Kilhefner’s piece on the founding of the Radical Faeries [in the Sept.-Oct. 2010 issue]. I have never considered myself, formally, a Radical Faerie, but I found myself almost in tears at the end of it, especially when the author talked about the feelings that he, Harry Hay, and John Burnside had driving back from that first gathering—that “something of historical and spiritual significance for gay people had just transpired, and our silence spoke of how humbled we were by the experience.” In our irony-saturated age of trivializing feelings and worshipping banality, it would be wonderful to get back to that sense of closeness, beauty, tenderness, and openness.
I also loved that Kilhefner brought in the importance of a radical consciousness that was such an important part of Gay Liberation; as well as the concept of essentialism, which I have fought for tooth-and-nail for decades against the ego-centric dogmas of too many academics; and the significance of a generational transmission of values and love. This is an important piece of historical writing, and also of our own evolving history. I am delighted that it was in The GLR.
Perry Brass, Bronx, NY
To the Editor:
With reference to Don Kilhefner’s essay on the Radical Faeries, perhaps there was an inadvertent omission of a fourth residential Faerie sanctuary [in addition to Wolf Creek, Oregon, Zuni Mountain, New Mexico, and Short Mountain, Tennessee], namely at Camp Destiny in Vermont.
Readers may also be interested in an interview with Don Kilhefner that I did, along with a friend, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the first Radical Faerie gathering. The interview was published in RFD magazine, issue 139, Autumn 2009.
Fred Vassie, Torrance, CA
The Gay Gift to Spiritual Evolution
To the Editor:
Thank you for publishing Donald Boisvert’s essay, “A Pilgrimage Spiritual and Scholarly” in the Nov.-Dec. 2010 issue. Boisvert eloquently captures the common, if often spurned, religious or spiritual substrate of gay consciousness. One of the traits that seems to characterize so many gay men is a sensitivity to the patterns of religion and an impetus to virtue, excellence, and service. This stereotype—the gay priests, church organists, teaching brothers, ex-seminarians-turned-social-workers, etc.—has its basis in reality.
Gay people, almost automatically and naturally, have strong opinions and ideas about religious issues. We have been forced to think through matters that most people just take for granted. Many of us have “abandoned” religion, but often out of truly religious motives; our insight into what’s important has called us to move on beyond traditional religion, to leave the Church for the sake of spirituality. Some of us go on to scorn religion; the hatefulness of certain very visible religious leaders to gay civil rights justifies rage at their obvious disregard for basic human respect. Others, like Boisvert and the queer scholars of religion he writes of, have transcended religion by reclaiming and transforming it. This is the modern spiritual pilgrimage.
Boisvert identifies four general thematic approaches in gay male studies in religion: the assertive (gay is not sinful), the historical (gay men have been part of religion all along), the subversive (religious hunger and sexual hunger arise from the same source), and the cultural (gay life recreates religious patterns like ritual, shared values and community). I would like to propose a fifth: the evolutionary. This quality, in fact, underlies and is contained within the others, but because it’s so important, I think it ought to be specified.
The gay interface with religion is part of a larger transformation of human understanding of what religion is. Science, historical perspective, global culture, psychological sophistication—modernity is forcing everybody to rethink the very nature of religious thought. For all (and any) religions to be true, the truths of religion must be metaphorical, mythological, and psychological. This is a major evolution in the nature of “God,” and one to be welcomed as part of the ongoing growth of consciousness. “God” makes more sense—and paradoxically possesses more reality—when understood as a phenomenon of consciousness in the mind than as a personal being located somewhere in space-time. Understanding religious truth from over and above any particular mythological tradition expands and enriches its meaning. Gay people learn to experience the world with a certain “critical distance” as part of coping with growing up different; such critical distance makes us naturals for an enlightened—and liberated—understanding of myth and symbol.
These issues force gay people to seek a new paradigm—one that for want of an explicit term is being popularly called “spiritual but not religious.” Our issues force all thinking people to question the old paradigms. That politicians use the gay rights struggle to organize religious people to vote against their own best interests is evidence that the compassion and loving kindness called for by Jesus is not the motivation being stirred up in the churches. That a gaydar-pinging Pope can blame the homosexual rights movement for the sins of the hierarchy protecting pedophiles (men sexually conflicted because of their religious indoctrination) and punish openly gay priests for what the deeply closeted ones did is empirical evidence that “God” is not guiding the Church.
The visibility—and general respectability—of openly gay people in modern society challenges cultural gender roles and stereotypes that have long been inculcated by religion. Our “pride” witnesses to an affirmation of sexuality and physicality (what Boisvert refers to as the “subversive”). In the world after Freud, the anti-sex messages of traditional religion appear psychopathogenic. Gay consciousness, feminism, and sexual liberation in general call for transformation of religious messages. The work of gay scholars and sex-and-spirit activists (like Joseph Kramer) provides direction for how a scientifically sensible and psychologically healthy world mythology should look.
And in the long run, this may be the most important consequence of the gay rights movement: waking the world up to a “cutting edge” paradigm of evolving spirit. As Boisvert observed, people that we would now loosely call gay or queer were the shamans and mystics and seers who started religion in the first place; it’s right that we be in the forefront of its transformation into the 21st century. In a paradoxical way, I think, we gay people on a spiritual pilgrimage to “higher consciousness” may show the way for the best and most beautiful parts of religious history to be saved.
Toby Johnson, Austin, TX
Constitutional Basis of the Civil Rights Act
To the Editor:
In the article “The American Equality Bill: Our Time Has Come” (Sept.-Oct. 2010 isue), Todd Fernandez cites the equal-
protection clause of the 14th Amendment and asserts that “it was pursuant to this power that Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” That assertion is not quite accurate.
The equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment limits the powers of states, not of private actors. Indeed, while the Civil Rights Act of 1875 sought to enforce the equal-protection clause against private actors, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down that law in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 on the basis that the 14th Amendment gave Congress no power to achieve that end. Instead, the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 relating to private actors are based on the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce under Article I of the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court held that exercise of federal power to be constitutional in Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States.
This distinction has real-world consequences for those who would draft do-good legislation. For instance, the Supreme Court applied the Civil Rights Cases in striking down parts of the Violence Against Women Act in 2000.
David J. Edmondson, Alexandria, VA
Correction
An editorial error crept into a passage in Jeff Mann’s article on bear culture (Sept.-Oct. 2010). The offending sentence reads: “These proto-bears did not relate to the well-groomed urban gay lifestyle; nor did they find in conventional masculinity many qualities worth preserving.” It should end with: “they found in conventional masculinity many qualities worth preserving.”
