The Right Wing's Prescription for Women

Planned Parenthood has been a target of the right wing for years. The current congress has gone to great lengths to demonize the private non-profit agency which provides millions of women, poor and otherwise, with health services including contraception and abortion. For all the insistence on the part of the rightwingers that the issue is preventing government-funding of abortion, the facts show that this is a smokescreen. There's a pie-chart floating around that clearly shows that abortions represent a small portion of Planned Parenthood's services. Given the legal hostility from many Republican and Democratic congresspeople in recent years, Planned Parenthood has worked very hard to follow the letter of the law and isolate the federal funding it gets from those abortion services. But it's futile to present either of these facts to the foes of Planned Parenthood, because the truth is that abortion is only the tip of the iceberg of their objections.

The rightwingers claim they are waging a battle based on moral and religious opposition to abortion based on the "sanctity of life." But what is actually quite clear is that these right wingers are actually waging a battle against something much bigger. And this is revealed by the current controversy over the initial Obama administration insistence that healthcare reform means that religious employers must include access to contraception in the insurance plans they offer to non-clerical employees like the teaching and medical professionals who work for churches and hospitals run by religious institutions. While it seems tragically likely that the Obama administration will concede this argument, the current controversy forces the right wing to admit that contraception itself is their actual problem, even knowing that contraception is a proven abortion preventative. Yes, that's right, the right wing does not want women to have access to the means to control their own bodies.

The right wing wants to defund Planned Parenthood not out of concern for some moral abstraction, but because it wants to preserve the dependency of women, especially poor and working-class women. The Sarah Palins and Michel Bachmanns of the far-right fringe notwithstanding, independent women who are not dependent on men are societal threat to the way the far right wants the world to look. And more fundamentally working-class women who rely on the affordability that government-funded healthcare provides are to them simply expendable.

The recent flap over the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure's shameful temporary plan to withdraw financial support of Planned Parenthood is illustrative. The Komen Foundation is less an institution concerned with women's health than a money-making scheme, a front for fake concern about the inadequate funding of women's healthcare. Forget how an organization allegedly concerned about women's health could sponsor pink buckets of the Colonel's greasy chicken, how could an organization allegedly concerned about women's health, full of smart people who know every last detail of those financial distribution pie-charts, claim that pulling the plug on poor women getting breast screenings could have anything to do with abortion at all? Who actually believes that? Only right wing ideologues with an agenda, that's who.

Here's the truth: This is yet another front on the class war being waged by the privileged classes on regular people. They don't want to pay for abortion, for contraception, for breast screenings, because they don't want to fucking pay for anyone's healthcare at all. Well, except their own.

Funny, it always comes down to the same problem....and the same solution.

Crunching the Numbers...of Perverts

Every day I look at the stats that Skynet aka Google Blogger provides me with about my blogs. This is an interesting exercise. The first thing you learn doing this is that most people on the internet are looking to get their rocks off. Internet viewers are sex-obsessed perverts. A creepy number of my 114,000+ pageviews are people with one of their hands nowhere near the computer keyboard.

Sometime back I wrote what I thought was an interesting feminist analysis of fashion fascism as observed in Atlantic City, exploring a common thread between the enforced hypersexuality of the Jersey shore look and the repressive Burqa garment. This post consistently scores high on my most popular posts. Finally I noticed another statistic that showed why: one day the high scoring search keywords included "Atlantic City prostitutes." Thus, my legion of thoughtful feminist readers turned out to be a bunch of horny lonely men trapped at conventions and casinos looking for a little paid entertainment. Oh well.

I wrote an article about the outrageously racist teabagger candidate for New York governor, a fan of bestiality emails, with the intentionally ironic and eye-catching title "I would rather have sex with a horse than vote for Carl Paladino." Always a popular post on my stats: Yes it turns out that a whole LOT of people are hoping I posted pictures of horse sex. Sorry to disappoint. Now get out of that stable and leave the livestock alone. That's abuse, folks.

Some stats are indeed encouraging. Readers like pictures of OWS protests. Pieces I wrote that got picked up elsewhere remain popular reads: being a gay leftist and the piece I wrote on the video game Homeland both got some circulation. My music obituaries are popular.

I haven't entirely figured out why my post about the Oscars which used a picture of Oscar the Grouch snatched from Google has made it so high up in Google search results. A lot of people worldwide are looking for a picture of that grouchy puppet in a garbage can. Day after day for months this image was the top search result and top viewed post here on The Cahokian. I found this a little discouraging actually, cause this post says almost nothing.

But now here's something truly fascinating. For the past two weeks Oscar is no longer the most popular post or search: He has been supplanted by my post about Newt Gingrich and his serial adultery, "Newt Gingrich Will Always Love America. Unless it Gets Cancer," replete with an early photo of him with his first wife and former high-school teacher Jackie Battley Gingrich. It turns out America is fascinated by Newt. Does this mean America will vote for Newt? Are they laughing with him or at him? That is the eternal question. But on a blog where posts about Michele Bachmann's mental illness or the possibility that Mitt Romney participates in Mormon Human Sacrifice have not made a statistical dent, I find it really interesting that Newt is more popular than muppets, prostitutes, or sex with large farm animals.

Speaking of eternal questions: laugh or cry?

Echoes of a Past Life - Confessions of a Pornographer (part one)

I moved to New York City in 1981 to work on a socialist newspaper. The job was great, the salary subsistence level. It didn't take me more than a year or two to realize that the Big Apple was no place for no money, so while I continued for a while to design the paper on a volunteer basis, I jumped at the opportunity to take a real job for real money. My socialist paper gig had taught me the basics of professional graphic design and the publishing biz, so when my friend David said he knew of a typesetting job at a magazine company he thought the two of us could share, I eagerly agreed.

The magazine company was looking for an evening shift to cover its expanding roster, and yes as long as everything got covered, the two of us could divide up nights. Eventually David moved on to his real interest of journalism and the shift was all mine. We arrived at the office late each afternoon when everybody else was getting ready to leave. We were handed a manila folder of typed manuscripts ready to be typeset on their state-of-the-primitive-art CompuGraphic editwriter, a prehistoric dinosaur level computer with a spinning filmstrip that exposed rolls of photosensitive paper; which would then be developed in a special kind of dark-room simulating processor machine. The job was basically retyping and coding manuscripts to turn them into galleys of type that would be cut and pasted up by the art department the next morning.

There was one detail about Modernismo Publications that we needed to know. While Modernismo published a line of high-end knitting magazines in seven European languages, its bread and butter came from "Adult Sophisticate" magazines. The daytime typesetter preferred to work on the knitting magazines: she wanted little to do with "Adult Sophistication," which, it turned out, were codewords for smut. Modernismo published a line of pornographic gay magazines: Mandate, Honcho, Playguy, Torso and Inches, and a line of heterosexual skin magazines: Juggs, Legshow, and Cinema Blue. While I was there they started an absolutely hilarious boxing magazine called Fight Beat but that's another story.

Anyway, being a red-blooded young gay man I was familiar with the gay magazines. Mandate had literary pretensions, combining legit fiction and cultural writing with fantasy stories and skin spreads, plus the occasional travel feature and actual news story. Honcho was a little edgier, focusing on hyper-masculine models, gearing its taste in fantasy in the direction of the leather crowd. Playguy, despite its catchy name, was a sort of sad orphan, showing skinny young models who looked younger than their of-legal-age-IDs, catering no doubt mostly to the dirty old man set. It was the cusp of the AIDS epidemic and while the disease was eventually going to cut a swathe through the magazine's editorial and art staff, as well as through its audience and cultural sensibility, these magazines all still adhered to a late 1970s hedonistic sensibility of newfound freedom and openness in gay male sexuality. I thought it would be a hoot to work on these.


Modernismo was owned by George Mavety, a big man almost always seen smoking a cigar. He was a sort of poor man's Larry Flynt. Rumored to have an actual family somewhere, it was not unusual to see him keeping company with some busty young blonde. Mavety was a classic entrepreneur, and while heterosexual himself, he knew the value of his property. His cultivation of gay pornography was shrewd and successful: the gay mags were staffed all with gay men and given a fairly independent editorial voice. But Mavety was well immersed in the pornography world as a whole. One day a Japanese skin magazine came to the office and took photos of the place for a feature they were writing on the American trade. That's me at my typesetting machine in the top center of this photo montage from Japan's "Bachelor" magazine. (Modernismo eventually became Mavety Media Group; George Mavety died in 2000; his gay magazines finally shut down just a year or so ago)

Of course I had to work on Modernismo's heterosexual magazines as well and that was an education. "Juggs" and "Legshow" were not "Playboy." "Juggs," whose tagline was "The world's dirtiest tit-mag" was all about women's breasts, the bigger the better. It featured chubby models, older models, pregnant models ("lactating lovelies"), anyone who would display absolutely huge breasts. Ironically, Jugg's reigning "Tit Queen," a frequent centerfold and regular columnist was the original Candy Samples--no relation to my current Drag Queen friend of the same moniker--whose breasts were each larger than her head. "Legshow" was for the legs-and-ass crowd. Both mags were mass market hardcore, which meant they could compete with anatomy textbooks for their raw display of female genitalia, but being sold on newsstands they could not show penetration or actual sex. These magazines had no literary or cultural pretensions, just crude raw fuel for male masturbatory fantasies.

The difference between the gay and straight pornography I spent my evenings typesetting was a fascinating lesson in objectification and fantasy. I'll leave a fuller discussion of that for another essay. But I took the job and became a kind of working-class cog in the real pornography industry...it was a crazy job. I'll talk about what it was like to work as a pornographer in a third essay.

Fast forward a year or two: I left Modernismo for a job at a small family-owned type shop. Turned out I was a really good typesetter. It wasn't just typing: my typographic sense and design talent and my ability to get these primitive computers to churn out better quality turned out to be a marketable skill (for a little while, anyway) and after a couple years typing smut it was time to move on. But who doesn't need extra money? I had remained friends with the editor of the straight mags at Modernismo and I asked him if I could write some stories for him. I figured even if I was a textbook Kinsey 6 of a gay man I had lots of experience in reading these stories as I typeset them, so how difficult could it be to write them? I knew I was planning to take a spring and summer off to travel to Nicaragua, and I figured I could write stories from there, send em in, and keep a small paycheck going.

I was thrilled that he agreed. He greenlighted the one story I wrote before my trip and then I sent him a small handful of stories I typed out on my trusty manual typewriter from Managua. And I got paid; not a lot, but enough to soften the blow of my return to the States after a summer away.

Now here's the thing. I wasn't going to write gay pornography, not stories I actually found hot. I was going to write crude Juggs-style porn. The stories for Juggs were hilarious to me. Compared to the gay stories with romantic subtexts, the straight stories were raw exercises in titillating escapism where average Joes lived among ravishing women wanting nothing more than pure physicality, unencumbered by actual responsibilities or real-life complications. I wanted to take the stereotypical scenarios from straight porn and the vile objectification and rude language and ridiculous cliches and see if I could subversively produce a story that I thought was amusing. And so a new pseudonym was born, Sergeant Babs "Bust 'Em" Brady.

The stories I wrote are filthy dirty, full of words I would never use and can't believe I'm going to retype for this blog. But they make me laugh every time I read them. I don't think they're exactly erotic; they're meant to be subversively over-the-top. I still had--and have--a commitment to a certain kind of (sex-positive) feminist ideal, and I didn't want to completely betray my principles, even if the scenarios I had been typesetting for so long blurred crucial lines between rape and consensuality. But I thought it would be hilarious if I, a gay man, writing in the voice of a heterosexualized lesbian, could write satirical caricatures of straight pornography and have them published as actual pornography, and that is what I did. Here is the first of these stories. I have two more of them sitting by my 'puter and will continue these in later installments of "Confessions of a Pornographer."

-----

"You're Under a Breast"
by Sgt. Babs "Bust 'Em" Brady
Originally published in the December 1986 issue of Juggs Magazine


[Editor's note, 2013. I decided after thinking this over and over that this writing was just too rapey to let stand. It was done with some humor that does not survive the moment, as an in-joke, and because, frankly, I was a little angry and bitter, at a lot of things. I'm not going to apologize for writing it, that would be disingenuous, but I'm gonna say it wasn't my proudest moment. So I'm pulling the actual porn story I wrote. In so doing, I'm not taking a stand against porn, or analyzing the complicated human psyche that might eroticize rape in an abstract fantasy setting; but I am taking a stand against saying that there's anything funny about actual, real rape. And I will not be adding the two other porn stories I wrote to the "Echoes of the Past" series. Sorry if you've been waiting all these years for the follow up. Live and learn. Respect each other. —ISH]

The Forgotten Legacy of Left-wing Homophobia

In the face of today's resurgent right-wing fundamentalist movement which demonizes gays, using opposition to marriage equality as an excuse for dragging out tired old arguments and prejudices, it's hard sometimes to remember how far, in fact, we've all come. In the face of right-wing Americans running off to Uganda helping to organize "death to sodomites" rallies and backing super-repressive legislation in such countries, it seems natural to think of the movement for gay equality, or what we once called gay liberation, as walking hand in hand with other socially progressive movements. But it wasn't always like this. There used to be profound divisions on the left as well. I was reminded of this when I ran across this pamphlet tucked into a crowded shelf. Published in Canada by the Maoist/pro-Albania communist sect Lines of Demarcation, "On the Question of Homosexuality" was published in 1981 reprinting a dialogue between the group and the left-leaning Body Politic Collective, which published a progressive, gay news journal in the 1970s and 1980s. Reading like one of today's ultra-right evangelical texts, the blurb on the back promises "a clear analysis of the foundations of homosexuality in class society and upon the oppression of women and discusses the reactionary character of the homosexual recruitment movement."

This pamphlet is a sad little reminder of some of the tragically awful thinking that has plagued the left, especially its dogmatically varieties. While Canada's Lines of Demarcation might have, I hope, faded into historical obscurity, the US Revolutionary Union, since evolved into the Revolutionary Community Party and more recently the force behind the "Not In Our Name" wing of the anti-Iraq war movement, once held positions identical to these.

I won't attempt to summarize all of this hateful pamphlet's arguments, but let a few lines speak for themselves and serve as a grain of salt:

"The Bolsheviks must take a stand against, and expose, homosexuality. The social institution of homosexuality itself stands in antagonistic contradiction with the proletarian revolution. Homosexuality in the ranks of the Bolsheviks and in the ranks of the revolutionary proletariat will erode the struggle against the bourgeoisie, will introduce bourgeois individualism and degeneration, will sap the righting capacity of the proletariat, will drag back the struggle for the political unity of the sexes and for the complete emancipation of women. The complete abolition of homosexuality is a goal of the proletarian revolution and will be a great step forward in the liberation of the proletariat.... Homosexuality did nothing to promote the survival of the species. Those who perceive the world through their gonads, as does the homosexual recruitment movement, will never be able to grasp this very simple idea, but to a materialist it is obvious...The role and influence of homosexuality in modern decadent imperialist art is extremely important to the entire construction of the antisocial offensive by the imperialist bourgeoisie against socialist revolution....The entire discotheque culture -- its lights, its dancing, its music -- originated on Fire Island, New York, a gathering place of homosexuals and has been seized upon with full vigour by the bourgeoisie for its entire offensive in the corruption of youth, diverting them from political concerns and sapping their fighting capacity....The same holds true of fashion. The fad of long hair for young men begun among homosexuals; then, when large numbers of young men were letting their hair grow long, the homosexuals led the charge back to short hair....The homosexual movement is a consistent ally of every agent of bourgeois reaction which is willing to 'come out' and embrace it, from the lowliest Trotskyite all the way up to the United States Marines....Its doom is spelled by the inevitability of the proletarian victory."

Echoes of a Past Life - Is This the Boy Side of the God/dess?

This is another piece from Queer Pagan days, and another polemic, if you will, against the gender division central to much of modern Pagan belief.

My attraction to Paganism was initially to its idea of the immanent and female Goddess that is the living planet earth around us. I was attracted to the work of many feminist scholars (some of whose work has been discredited in "scientific" circles) who interpreted early human religious beliefs as worship of an Earth Mother, alive and present in the world around us. This, all in counterpoint to the Judeo-Christian concept of transcendent, invisible, and male God figure living somewhere up in the sky, ie, in heaven. Many of these feminist scholars portrayed human history as an extension of a struggle for male-female dominance, suggesting that modern alienated and male-dominated society was the fruit of the victory of "male" sky religion over "female" earth religion. As a gay person and a feminist I found a lot to admire in that concept; and I still think there is some validity in it. Certainly it's a fact that history is written by the victors, and it's tremendously productive to reexamine history through a lens that rejects the triumph of Judeo-Christian values over "primitive" ones as necessarily progressive.

But as my spirituality deepened I came to think that viewing everything through the duality of gender was about as productive spiritually and politically to me as it was to me personally, which is to say that as a non-heterosexual, flipping male-dominant spirituality on its head didn't get any closer to the way I experience the world as a same-gender loving individual. In Santeria, the religion I wound up adopting (although I would say my belief-system remains personal and idiosyncratic beyond somebody else's particular definition), gender is more fluid, and so to me a more accurate reflection of reality. It's not that I think my own gender is fluid, it's not, but that I think the world around us, especially its spiritual aspect, is not as easily split into clear male and female halves. I'm less interested in the division but in the unity. I don't see that counterpoint between sky God and earth Mother Goddess anymore: it's all one amazing, glorious, living presence, multi-faceted and miraculous beyond measure. It's not useful for me to see God the supreme being as an old man sitting on a cloud somewhere, though I certainly don't reject the image of Santeria's Obatala as an old white-clad man up on a mountain. And frankly it's no longer useful to see a Supreme Goddess as merely a fertile and fecund Mother hiding in the dirt beneath us (though again I don't reject the image of Santeria's Yemaya nurturing us from her ocean lair). All these ways of trying to describe the barely describable spiritual experience are simply not counter posed. They can all exist together. In unity. And in complete inadequacy for anything actually approaching accurate description of the mystery that is Life, that is God.

The halves of the yin and the yang, those are all present everywhere in us and around us. The productive tension of male and female aspects is not all external: it's not all about men and women. Sometimes it's about finding a unique balance point inside ourselves, as solitary individual beings, enabling us to find productive fulfillment in living out our lives, no matter the literal or metaphoric genitalia attached to ourselves or the ones we love.

Anyway, my original essay is below. I note, this time, the absence of a pseudonym!

(Artwork note: the photo above is from a gravestone in northeast Pennsylvania, photographed by me about 1995. The art below is a woodcut of witches dancing around the horned god).



----
Is This the Boy Side of the God/dess?
by Ian Scott Horst
Originally appeared in the Heartfire 9994 (Winter 1994) issue of Queer Pagans Newsletter

In traditional Wicca, priestesses are supposed to wear a moon crown to suggest their incarnation of the female Goddess, and male priests are supposed to wear a stag-horned crown to suggest their incarnation of the male God. Some time ago I took to wearing to certain rituals as a talisman a piece of antler I had long ago bought in Finland. The amulet is a piece of reindeer antler, and it became to me a powerful magical tool. Then I discovered something important about it: In reindeer, antlers are found on both the males and females. And this fact became emblematic of something for me, and this knowledge increased the power of the tool.

For me the idea of the Horned God is an idea full of paradox. His energy is energy I know I possess: energy I have felt myself channel in ritual, energy I have surrendered to whilst thrashing about in bed, energy I have faced as I stared into the eyes of other Priests. When I look at my own sexuality and mortality, I find in this idea of the Horned God tremendous strength in seeing my own sensual alive-ness as the presence of the Divine. Its presence within me in the fuse-short minutes that are this life, my life, is a gift. But I find myself questioning, who, or what, exactly, is this Horned God?

I spent years as a political person on a trajectory from hard-core leftist to queer activist, and so when I found in the convergence of my feminist principles and awakening spirituality the concept of God as Goddess, as Great Mother, as Cosmic Female, I found myself in a moment of harmonic epiphany. Like most of you, presumably, I found my rejection of an invisible male authority-figure-God and my embrace of a materially-present loving Goddess a liberating, empowering act. And here on this path I found not anti-sexual judgment but a commitment to the idea that all consensual acts of sexuality and sensuality were celebrations of Divine spirit.

There are many paths that might be considered Neo-Pagan. Orthodox Wicca holds that the Goddess is half of a male-female divine couple, the Lord and Lady. Wiccans love to divide everything into male and female correspondence: The Lady is, I suppose, the female Deity I've described above. The Lord is the Horned God. His images are powerful, based on an amalgam of ancient paleolithic art, Celtic and Graeco-Roman myth and medieval English folklore. He is represented as being half human and half animal. His stag horns suggest the vibrancy of the wild animal, the mortality of the hunted, and the literal "horniness" of a rutting beast.

I call myself a Priest/ess now. I am male: and like you, I celebrate my gender because it's who I am. I am proudly and openly Queer, and like you I celebrate my sexuality because it's who I am. Like you I find Divine inspiration, validation and connection in the way I live, in the way I will die; in the way I fuck or get fucked, in the way I walk down the street, in the way I eat, shit, and sleep. You, man or woman, are you different? Is this a boy thing? Or is the lesson of the Horned God more simple: you better live and fuck now while you have the chance. I don't know about you but I don't think the Horned God is half of anything.

Echoes of a Past Life - Holes & Poles

The argument by right-wing fundamentalists -- and some not so right-wing ones -- that marriage should be the exclusive provenance of heterosexuals because of the fruitful nature of the one man + one woman pairing reminded me of this polemic I wrote back in my Pagan days. Pagans, I suppose that means Wiccans particularly, celebrate the holiday of Beltane on May Day with a enjoyably pastoral frolic in an open field: a tall pole, fastened with long colored ribbons, is implanted in the ground. Participants are lined up boy-girl-boy-girl in a circle around the pole, and holding the ends of the ribbons dance around it in a circular, weaving pattern, winding the ribbons down the length of the pole in an interlocking lattice and raising a whole lot of energy. It's enjoyable but insufferably metaphoric for the literal minded, and it becomes one of those unbearably Freudian exercises that my queer Pagan friends were always trying to figure out how to reclaim in a less overtly heterosexual manner.

It turns out that even though Paganism may seem like a left-of-center religion, that's not always the case. But as straight Pagans might find divine validation in this celebration of heterosexual union just as straight Christians find divine validation in Adam and Eve, the untidy presence of Adam and Steve seems to crash the party and suddenly the metaphor isn't so perfect. The response of the intolerant is to insist that everybody fall in line and end the discussion, casting out and condemning the parts of the equation that don't fit; hopefully the response of the rest of us is to check our assumptions and expand our understanding of the complexity of the human experience.

In retrospect I'm left asking a fundamental question about my argument: is fertility only the product of difference? I'm not sure I've gone far enough here in questioning that dualistic assumption. Anyway, here's the original article. It's another piece from Our Pagan Times, the newsletter of New York's open Pagan circle New Moon, and that's my sorry pseudonym.

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Holes, Poles & The God/dess
by Moonchild
from Our Pagan Times, Vol. 2 No 6 (#16), June 9992 [1992]

Last month in OPT, Beth Goldstein's article "Beltane and You: An Engendered Approach," examined and defended one form of traditional approach to celebrating Beltane with a May pole. In addressing the problem that this ritual might entail for non-heterosexual participants, the article posited that sex is one thing, beautiful in its diverse possibilities, and fertility--reproduction--is another, beautiful in its unique heterosexuality. In essence, that the heterosexual imagery of such a Wiccan maypole shouldn't prevent those who are not heterosexual from fully participating in and appreciating the meaning of such a ritual done in the "traditional" manner.

It is my opinion--and I recognize this is an opinion not held by all homosexuals--that the maypole ritual as practiced by much of the Wiccan community is a limiting view of sexuality and fertility; and that the Freudian excesses of such a maypole ritual are not only potentially heterosexist but deforming to the understanding of a profound cosmic truth.

I am an exclusively homosexual man. Although in part this has to do with what I like to do in bed, it far more has something to do with who I am. What makes me different from straight people is not only--repeat not only--that I like to rub genitals and mucous membranes in different combination than straight people, but a profound interpretation of my place in the cosmic picture. Simply put, the Goddess didn't breath this life into me to enable me to make babies. Sure, my sperm could presumably help make babies as well as any man's, and certainly there are many gay people who do parent children. But if we accept that the Goddess is immanent in all life, and that the key to The Mystery is within us, and my life is not about reproduction of babies, where does that leave me, and my kind, on Beltane? Certainly not celebrating someone else's potentials.

Beth's article defines the realm of sexuality as "Heterosexuality Homosexuality, Bisexuality, Autoeroticism and Psychodrama," and the realm of fertility and reproduction as the Sacred Fucking-for-Pregnancy of Male and Female. Yet for me, homosexuality is not merely a question of what one likes to do (or not do) with penises and vaginas, and certainly not the equivalent of masturbation or psychodrama (phone sex?). Perhaps most important of all, it is certainly not a choice, though the decision to express it may well be one. It is, rather, a life-shaping force.

Beth says that regardless of sexuality men and women can and should be able to take "traditional" roles on Beltane with no internal contradictions. I say that these "traditional" roles are, in fact, potentially insulting to lesbians and gays, and the product of a giant pole-in-hole metaphor run amok.

Fertility exists at the point of balance between the Divine Male and Female, between the light and the dark, the earth and the sky, the cosmic force and form. This fertility exists on all realms and planes from the merest physical reproduction to the sweep of the winds and brilliance of lightning to the magical mental spark that creates symphonies. The ability to create is the miraculous interplay of difference. The physical replication of bodies by the interplay of male and female is only one of billion fruits of this fertile possibility. With us, too, lies the ability to turn the inner differences all of us possess--which sometimes manifest as the inner maleness and femaleness--into a fertile dance of explosive power and creativity. What this means is that to choose, as a symbol, the particular miracle of heterosexual reproduction is to make, in effect, a political choice. And to make this choice is to potentially exclude others whose choices are shaped by different realities.

It may be that for certain desired effect such a choice is made. That is not a problem, if the making of that choices is stated. The problem arises when we begin to make that choice for others. Should we decided that Beltane celebrates strictly physical reproduction then our celebration needs to speak to each participant in a way that fills her or him with the Divine. The Freudian pole/hole thing of many modern Wiccans just doesn't work for me.

When we deal with each other as Pagan brothers and sisters in this grand and gorgeously motley brood, it is incumbent upon us to speak clearly of all possibilities. Those of us who are blessed with heterosexuality will find our gifts and use them, and sometimes to the exclusion of homosexuals. The same is true of those of us blessed with homosexuality, or the shades in between. The Goddess blesses us with a divine ability to mold our Pagan religious practices to be true to our own hearts, and this is indeed the duty of us all. But there are times and places to come together and find the common ground, and hopefully that is the space New Moon aspires to.