Crossposting from Ile Oxumare: Galaxy Around Olodumare

Here's an essay, with a compilation, I posted on one of my music blogs earlier this year.



Where does it come from? What is the source of inspiration for the music we love? Those of us who speak about "spiritual jazz" or "cosmic jazz" what are we talking about: I mean if you play John Coltrane's "Ascension" backwards do you hear the Lord's Prayer or something? These are bigger questions than I can answer, but here's a contribution to the discussion.

In the traditional religion of the Yoruba peoples of West Africa, Olodumare is one of the names of God. Olodumare is found in the patterns of the natural world. By discovering these patterns, by finding one's own identity and destiny in these patterns and rhythms, adherents seek to live the best and most spiritually fulfilled life possible. Key to finding, experiencing and understanding these patterns are divination and music. Through music and divination it's seen as possible to petition the divine world for help and advice in the material world. Helping human beings along the way are the orishas, "gods" if you will, personified forces of nature and humanity that can guide, assist, and open--or close--the paths along the way. There's Obatala, the mountain orisha of wisdom and creativity. There's Yemaya, the ocean orisha of motherhood and familyhood. There's Ochun, the river orisha of love and money. There's fierce Chango, the thunder god of dance and power. There's Babalu Aiye, the orisha of sickness and health. There's Oxumare, the orisha of the rainbow. There's Elegba, the trickster orisha best invoked at the beginning of all undertakings who lives at all crossroads both real and metaphorical.

You're not interested in an obscure African religion? Well here's the thing. The religion of the Yorubas was brought to the new world in the bellies of slave ships. In some places like Cuba, like Brazil, it survived and metamorphosed into the religions of Santeria and Candomble. In Cuba, for example, the songs and rhythms of Yoruba religion gave birth to Afro-Latin jazz. It's plain to see in the instrumentation, the rhythms themselves, and in the occasional mysterious chant surfacing at some point of musical intensity. In other places, like the U.S., traditional African religion buried itself deeper in the subconscious. The Lutherans and the Episcopalians might sing some pretty hymns, but it's in the singing and footstomping and more ecstatic musicality of churches rooted in Black America that the rhythm, the divine pattern of Olodumare, survived.

One of the gifts of our current age is the accessibility of knowledge, and with this knowledge comes awareness, and with awareness comes incredible cross-polination of experience and ideas. Once upon a time--and not so long ago in a historic sense--in the US people had to play drums in secret, out in the woods, at night. No longer. Today everything is connected.

But if, in a much more secular world, the patterns are sometimes harder to see, it doesn't mean they're not there. Today we have space telescopes searching the stars for signs. And you know what they have found? The pattern. Ancient cultures revered the spiral as a mystical symbol: endowing tiny creatures like snails with spiritual meaning. Pretty interesting that those fancy telescopes show the stars themselves arranged in spiral galaxies of unconceivable enormity, eh? When you stare up at those amazing stars that sense of wonder that becomes a kind of spiritual reverence, that's the same moment that so-called spiritual jazz seeks to reproduce on a much smaller, more immediate scale.

Which brings us to this compilation.

These are songs (mostly but not entirely influenced by Latin jazz) bringing the pattern back around. The songs here all contain elements of traditional Yoruba religion--most filtered through its Cuban/American form; all are either instrumentally based in traditional sacred songs or contain vocal sections using Lukumi, the form of Yoruba language that survives in the new world.

This is not particularly roots music. These songs make use of all the evolved musical gifts: western harmonies, developed jazz rhythms and structures, and even an accessibility from funk and pop. The traditional marries the new, and the pattern survives, expanding and growing, like the spiral galaxy itself. The old deities of a traditional religion make new appearances as their names and prayers echo in a newly updated sound. This compilation is not meant to convert you to an obscure religion, but to give you a glimpse at the pattern that makes enjoyment of music a passion with an undeniably spiritual nature.

The title of this compilation takes its name from a composition (not included here) by Alice Coltrane, who spent her life looking for the pattern in her own way. The cover image is an antique wooden "Opon Ifa," or divination tray, from West Africa; the center cut away to reveal the stars.

If you like this music, click on the labels below for more compilations by me, and more music posted on this blog by some of these musicians. A majority of the songs here are taken from albums still in print, so if you like something you can also go out and buy it!

This compilation, with details of track listings and download links, can be found in its original posting here.

Echoes of a past life: A Ball of Mirrors

It's a cold and rainy day after Christmas. I spent part of the afternoon ripping Madonna CDs to my computer so that I could listen to them at my desk; it was a little like watching my life flash before my eyes. Sure she's celebrity at its worst: the fake English accent, the African child-stealing, the atrocious acting, the overall narcissism. But she's actually a talented musician with a point of view and a shrewd sensibility for brilliantly surfing trends in pop dance music, leaving her junior imitators floundering in her wake. I can wax rhapsodic about obscure spiritual jazz, Brazilian art music, and obscure seventies gay disco, but somehow Madonna, as mainstream as she is, has held my attention over the years.

I actually remember the first time I heard of her: it was shortly after I moved to New York City, I believe. A graffiti artist named Michael Stewart had been killed by NYC cops. This was the era of Keith Haring and that whole East Village art scene, and the artsy counter-culture looked out for one another. I was walking in the village and was handed a flyer for a benefit in Stewart's honor: there would be a quite unknown singer at the benefit and her name was Madonna. To my regret I didn't hang on to that flyer or attend the event; shortly thereafter I heard her name again on the radio, singing this catchy new tune called "Everybody" that was becoming a big hit: a catchy urban sound with just a schmear of new wave and NYC proto-hiphop. I'm sure she never looked back.

I used to love to go dancing; and dance music, being so tied to its age, paints an easily-traced story of the decades. While Madonna stepped onto the scene after the heydey of disco and my youth, she's been there ever since. For the record Madonna and I are about the same age, and I can't imagine putting my own achy 51-year-old body through a night of dancing like I used to; I'm surely in awe of Madonna's physical regimen.

I wrote this essay on the power and meaning of dancing for the Queer Pagans zine back in the 1990s. In Madonna years that would be about the time of "Bedtime Stories." (For the record my favorite Madonna album is probably "Ray of Light" from 1998; its spirituality and rock- and trancemusic-influenced intensity has really held up for me more than some of her more sugar-coated earlier material.) Anybody following my writing here will note a repeated reference to an episode recounted in an earlier piece "Will the Gay Movement Survive AIDS." I'm happy that the point of view in this piece some ten years later is so much less bleak.

I opened this article with a bit of ancient Greek pagan poetry: an excerpt from Euripides' "The Bacchae" beginning "When shall I dance once more with bare feet the all-night dances." Click on the graphic to read this full size; this is a scan from the original QP zine.



-----

A Ball of Mirrors Like the Moon,
Communion, Like With God
by Ian Scott Horst
from QP #11, Ice & Promise 9994 [Feb. 1994]

I remember my first visit to a queer disco. It was in Chicago, probably late 1978. The place was the Bistro, located in a near-north noman's land home to low industrial buildings, drag clubs and leather bars. The crowd at the Bistro was mixed, a combination of gay men dressed down with fag-hags and adventuresome heterosexuals dressed up.

Near the entrance was a bar for serious drinkers and lost singles, but everyone else headed for the labrynthine arrangement of tables, potted palms, and velveteen divans circling the raised light-box that was the dance floor.

If I remember correctly, the dance floor was a checkerboard of flashing under-lit panels and shiny black gloss. At its edges were vents through which a dry ice fog would be pumped in the peak of our ecstasy. Hidden in a false ceiling above were trap doors from which confetti and feathers would swirl. Huge thumping speakers vibrated at the corners of the floor. Hanging from the rafters amidst a tangle of spinning colored lamps and flashing strobes was the mirrored ball, the ubiquitous idol we would worship there. For this disco was not just a place to socialize, but a place to lose oneself to the dance, to vibrate to rhythm until we soared through the very clouds to worship physical and spiritual ecstasy. Of course, a little LSD helped too.

Since it was the late '70s and not the late '80s, our dance was sexually charged ina way uncomplicated by mortal fear. And this was when we could dance to the entirety of Donna Summer's "MacArthur Park" suite without pangs of guilt or pains of betrayal over her as yet unuttered quips about "Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve."

It is interesting to me that pre-AIDS gay male culture was wrapped so inseparably with the dance. The disco become a kind of ritual religion, a spinning, whirling rite, a prelude to sexual abandon, a cultural center, a meeting ground. It was also, of course, self-absorbed, inward-looking and narcissistic. It was as though the mirror ball was not just a mechanism for spinning colored rays about the dance floor but a glittering symbol intoxicating us with our own images. For as we spun about the floor we found ourselves pulled in, to our center, finding our souls touched by the fire but in a way that left each alone, as though dreaming. It is an odd thing to be able to dance in a crowded floor and find the crowd melt aaway and disappear as the music seizes control.

Those were the days, you may remember, of the great schism between boys and girls. Chicago, like New York, is a big city, and there was little of that brother-and-sister-under-fier camaraderie of 1970s small town queer America. We dancing queens assumed at the time that lesbians were all stomping around the woods with their shirts off criticizing us for our puerile humor and hedonistic excesses. I suspect the truth is that queer women were undergoing their own formatice ecstasies, dancing in new found and self-shaped freedom.

Who would have dreamed this future, there, under those circumstances? Yet that which is dear to us now grew from seeds in those times. Even Queer Pagans as both people and thing owe direct lineage to those times of the dreaming dance. Starhawk's "The Spiral Dance" was first published in 1979, and is to considerable extent a product of the separatist lesbian feminist culture of that time. "The Spiral Dance" was a major force in opening Paganism to an audience beyond the heterosexist orthodox English traditionalist Wiccans. The Radical Faeries were officially founded also in 1979,a product of the new gay male self-awareness albeit in rejection of its materialism. And from the Faeries Pagans learned much about ritual innovation.

And so eventually the world spun on. I remember in the mid '80s going out with a friend to soem short-lived dance club in Manhattan. It was a weeknight, and the place was empty. Alone on the dance floor was a man with a pair of fans, lost in music. He was beautiful, his face a portrait of rapture, his solitude exquisite, lost in an act of inner communion both furious and serene. By chance we found out his name, and to sum up the 1980s, a month or two later we read his obituary in the gay press.

But the dance that is life continued, and something happened, at least to me, at the turn of the decade.

Jutting off the edge of Greenwich Village into the Hudson are the remnants of several abandoned piers. For years these piers were a kind of seedy sexual Disneyland. Even when there was no more privacy when the buildings on these piers were dissembled and carted away, the sex continued. Eventually the organizers of lesbian and gay pride day decided to throw an after-parade party, a dance, on one of these piers. And it was magic.

Under the sky, with laserbeams and fireworks instead of spinning lamps, with speakers two stories tall, thousands of us danced together. Queer people, men and women, survivors, entranced together, raising a powerful energy. It was different this time: we were high on adrenaline and pride. Instead of feeling like a vortex, pulling it all inside, I felt like bursting, like exploding with queer fire into an expanding, sweaty mass of brothers and sisters. Our mouths were open, roaring joy. Within the year I became a Pagan.

Dance is madness. Invisible bonds spring from music, wrapping themselves about your limbs, writhing around your hips, pulling and turning, transforming your body into the manic puppet of energy, of ecstasy. It is a seizure of the spirit. Open yourself to the invisible fury. Surrender to it. Cut the bonds of self-consciousness. Let it go. Become invisible. Dream a new world.

Accept communion.

Echoes of a past life: Finding My Way

It's just after the winter solstice, the time in the northern hemisphere when the night is the longest and the day the shortest. It's a visceral milestone of time, and somehow has magically come to coincide with a number of religious festivals (Christmas, Channukah, etc.) that disavow their cosmic timing but are nevertheless festivals of preserving light and warmth in the dark time. The Solstice was a key part of my spiritual journey, and I found an article that explains some of how it made an impact on what I have come to believe.

One of the stories not related here is that when my grandmother saw the name I had put on the back of the Solstice cards I was designing, she was horrified. I was trying to unify the different strands of my life and used a combination of my leftist-era "party" name pseudonym and my birth name: in the process I dropped my middle name which was her family name. She was rightfully offended; and I deserved the scolding. Shortly thereafter I jettisoned the leftist pseudonym completely and not only restored her family name to mine as a tribute to her, but decided I would always use my full three names. (Forgive me, gramma, for "ish" but it's the internet's fault.) The picture above does not include my grandmother, key to the story below, but is instead several generations of women from the Scott and Kimble/Kimball lines; I think the young woman in the center is her mother and the baby her older sister Ruth; it was taken in Michigan in the 1890s.

Forgive my complicated proto-feminist linguistic tics here: I was developing a critique of Neo-Paganism as gender-obsessed and exclusionarily heterosexist. I tended to add "/ess" to any possibly gender-assigned pronoun as an act of subversion. I came, in the end, to reject Neo-Paganism's God/Goddess dualism as hopelessly profane (and inane) in the face of God's awesome unity, transcending such trivialities as gender.

This essay is in fact a bit of a polemic against mainstream Wicca with its questionably orthodox myths and pastoral pretenses. It's worth noting that a bit more than two years after it was published I had left Neo-Paganism behind and been initiated into Santeria. I love cosmic curveballs.

_____

Finding My Way
by Ian Scott Horst
from "Coming Out Pagan," Spring 1994, Vol. 2 No. 1, published out of Bethesda, Maryland.

When my grandmother received one of my winter Solstice cards eight or nine years ago, she asked me what I meant. I explained to her how I didn't find any meaning in Christmas, but that I wanted to celebrate something at that time of year along with everybody else and wanted to send out cards to keep in touch with friends and relatives. The Solstice, I said, seemed to me a miraculous and obvious natural occurrence, not something that one needed to "believe" in and was therefore eminently deserving of celebration.

I was using the word "Pagan" then, even though I hadn't really figured out what it meant or what it meant for my future. Over the next couple of years, I came to explore the meaning of the concept of Paganism. At the same time, before her mind began to desert her, she came to confide in me how she had come to many of the same conclusions I had about religion and nature and the like. She was thinking of herself, in a way, as a Pagan, too.

I remembered how on my childhood visits to her home in California, she had shared with me her love of nature, taking me on walks through the woods and to the shore. And I remembered how I had eventually discovered her probable bisexuality and the definite lesbianism of her sister and next-door neighbor. And together, all these things made me feel close to her, and thankful toward her, despite our small presence in each others' day-to-day lives.

I like to think that my grandmother had much to do with who I am today and with my spiritual consciousness as a Gay Pagan priest/ess, and there is much truth in this statement. And how easy it would be to claim the illusory mantle of heredity, and how near the truth to say that my grandmother was a Witch and taught me her secret ways. But she was just a regular person living a regular -- if extraordinary -- life, passing on love and life's lessons to a young grandson she saw for only a few moments of her full life. Her herb garden was for ground cover and for cooking. Her knowledge of "secret ways" was no more nor less than those all of us regular people discover in the process of playing out the marvelous gifts of air, fire, water, earth and spirit.

The truth is that I am the first of my line (well, at least to my knowledge, say for a thousand years or so) to stand in a circle and call the God/dess by Her name(s). The fact that I have had to find my own way to Paganism undermines its practicable and fulfilling nature not one bit. For if most of the practices of my path are products of my, my friends', and my teachers' imaginations, they are most certainly not figments of our imaginations. The God/desses and spirits who guide us, talk to us, challenge us, teach us, summon us, protect us, listen to us, and bless us are as real and unmetaphorical as the wood of my desk, the purr of the furry cat sitting next to me, and the chill of the winter world outside my window.

After sending out my Pagan Solstice cards for five years or so, I decided that if I was going to call myself a Pagan, I ought to find out what that meant. That was the beginning of an odyssey which has lead me today to being co-Priest/ess of a coven, co-founder of New York City's Queer Pagans which averages forty people at each ritual, editor of a newsletter read by hundreds, and the proprietor of a small graphic design business named after the God/dess.

At first, I read a lot. And went for lots of walks in the park. I have to say that the walks in the park were of more use, ultimately, than most of the books I read. I learned that the winds would come if I talked to them and meant it, whether I called them watchtowers, guardians, spirits, powers, or whatever. The important part was the act of meaning it. I learned that if the books described a ritual situation which to me seemed a violation of my Queer heart, I should follow my heart and not the words on the printed page.

And I learned that if I felt isolated as a gay male Pagan among straight Pagans, I should find other Queer Pagans. And I learned that if most Queer Pagans I met were trapped in a cyccle of powerlessness, victimization, and complaint, or by a narrow view of gayness as just the sexual, I should simply manifest my vision and create a kind of Queer Pagan community I would feel comfortable in. This path has been rewarding beyond belief. I did not learn all these things by myself, and I am indebted to the teachers, Queer or straight, human or divine, who showed me something important and who framed an experience, a lesson, a gift.

Of course the unorthodox and eclectic carries with it many responsibilities. It is not a license to disregard advice or the power of the God/dess. It is, however, an opportunity to experience the real world that is really around you, around me. It means listening to the land we live on: land with no country; and a past not only older than we can imagine but older than the act of imagining itself. It means listening to the memories, voices, and rhythms carried here in the dreams of immigrants and nightmares of slaves. It means singing the chords created by the communities that are our cities. It means dancing to the beat of our experiences as Queer people. It means sacrifices and offerings, commitments and revelations, and rewards. It means standing on the dizzy precipice of now.

My way is to trust my heart, my mind, my spirit, my body. For in these places, the God/dess herself touches me, speaks to me, and opens a path before me, helping me to find my way.

May each of you find yours.

The Gaza massacre a year later

Required reading from the Lenin's Tomb blog in the UK, an evaluation of the Israeli attack on Gaza a year later: Operation Cast-Lead One Year On. Lenin's Tomb is the work of Richard Seymour, a member of the British Socialist Workers Party (no relation to the US one), and his analysis is sharper and more intelligent than anything passing for socialism on the US scene.

"The war on the population of Gaza is an attempt to break Palestinian resistance by means of destroying, in part, the aforementioned population."

Read the whole piece here.

A little optimism for the New Year

It's been quite a year. Here my favorite drag queen reminds us that the new year should be full of promise! Amen to that. There's a lot that could stand to get better. This one is very sweet and uplifting...a nice side to Candy.

Of course, my career as a Candy Samples video extra continues. And that's my cute boyfriend playing the guitar...he's a star!

Happy Holidays

Here's "Turkey Lurkey Time" by Burt Bacharach, from the Broadway Show "Promises Promises" as performed at the Tony Awards in 1968. This infectious holiday ditty, featuring Donna McKechnie's thighs, is about the only seasonal tune -- well, not counting Candy Samples -- I can stomach. Enjoy!

War Is Over If You Want It

"...I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

"I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. 'And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.' I still believe that We Shall overcome!"
--The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964

"We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations - acting individually or in concert - will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

"I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago - 'Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.' As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life's work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak, nothing naïve - in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

"But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism - it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

"I raise this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the cause. At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower."

--President Barack Obama in his acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize today

"War, huh
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing
Listen to me

"War, it ain't nothin' but a heartbreaker
War, friend only to the undertaker, oh

"Peace, love and understanding, tell me
Is there no place for them today?
They say we must fight to keep our own freedom
But Lord knows there's gotta be a better way"

--Edwin Starr/Norman Whitfield/Barrett Strong song lyrics, 1970

I give credit to President Obama for an attempt to reconcile his respect for the civil rights tradition while trying to justify his role as commander in chief of the largest military machine the world has ever known: he presented a thoughtful argument for the idea of a just war, for well-behaved war, for nice war with rules and fairness. His speech today has provoked me to read some other speeches, and to assess what I believe. I'd certainly rather hear Obama's reasoned argument than those base and empty appeals to "freedom" a la Reagan or Bush. If I wanted to hear that war is peace or freedom is slavery I know which bookshelf to find Orwell on. Obama is a good speaker if not, here, a fiery one, and I'm glad to be pushed to affirm my own views.

I am proud that my father and his paternal line were peaceful people who ran from war, who would uplift their lives and families and give up their homes rather than serve in the military. They did this over and over again when they fled Germany in the 1700s and when they fled Russia in the early years of the last century and when my father did it before I was born in the 1950s. But I'm also proud of my father's maternal line; that my great great grandfather donned that blue uniform to defeat the racist Confederacy.

I am deeply persuaded by Dr. King's profound notion that the long and difficult path of non-violence was the way to respond to the violence of racism in such a way as to transform and transcend a social relationship not just suppress or repress it. But I am also deeply persuaded by the righteousness of generations of anti-colonial revolutionaries who were drawn to armed struggle in their path of liberation.

These are contradictions, and I think it was courageous of Obama to acknowledge that fundamental contest of justice and violence. But here's another contradiction: I think that U.S. military intervention anywhere in the world--with the debatable exception of the Second World War--is always and fundamentally wrong. And I think it was deeply disingenous of Obama to weave so slender a thread around the real story of the misery inflicted by the U.S. on so many nations and peoples around the world in pursuit of its own self-righteous agenda.

As someone living in New York City during the events of September 11, 2001, I could easily have been one of the people the Al-Qaeda hijackers were trying to kill. I think that the religious fundamentalists behind those criminal attacks needed to be brought to justice; not because they dared threaten the American way of life but because they chose to blame and kill a bunch of innocent people. In that sense I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the American destruction of the Taliban in the aftermath of 9/11 if it's viewed as a mission to arrest criminals.

But it is the history of the crucible of those religious fundamentalists--Afghanistan--that shows the deadly chain reaction that belief in "a just war" causes. The "Just War" of the Soviets aiding the secular Afghan revolution; the "Just War" of the Mujahedeen expelling the foreign invaders; the "Just War" of the Taliban fighting the corrupt tribal Mujahedeen militias; the "Just War" of the US against the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda guests, and now, from someone else's perspective, the "Just War" of the Taliban again to expell new foreign invaders: where do these "Just Wars" end? How many regular people is it okay to kill to steer the wheels of history in a different direction?

Here's the thing. As long as people like Obama rationalize their seduction by war, all those good intentions mean nothing because in the end it comes down to parents on the wrong side of some arbitrary line on a map made to scream and weep inconsolably over the bloodied bodies of their children.

It took me many years to understand it, but John Lennon and Yoko Ono's famous Christmas Greeting is so deeply profound:

"WAR IS OVER! if you want it."

As long as the leaders of this world--both the ones in whom we've placed our aspirations for good, like Obama, and the ones we feared as pure corrupt evil, like Bush--look for the "moral justifications" in their use of bombs and tanks and drones and missiles and guns and mines and cluster bombs, then we, the regular people, will suffer. This world of violence is our choice...unless we stop wanting it; unless we're brave enough to listen to the likes of Dr. King without adding that terrible soul-corrupting word "but."

I'd like to choose peace.

Echoes of a past life: My Seven African Powers

I published a small edition of a hand-made booklet for friends and family in 1993. Entitled "My Seven African Powers" I published it under the Six of Swords Press imprint: it had a color xerox cover (a rarity back then) and illustrations that combined found objects, original photos, appropriated art scans, weird typography, and a series of poems and brief epigraphs I had written over a few years, tied together with a natural fiber ribbon cut from a grass skirt.

Like most of my writings, the poems covered both political and spiritual subjects, and were arranged to loosely correspond to the 22 trumps of the Tarot deck, starting with the The Fool. Some are doggerel, and some I'm very happy with. Several of the poems had their origins in Pagan rituals that explored expressing life experiences in a sacred manner. My Tarot teacher, Cayte Jablow, (also my co-leader of Queer Pagans and of our smaller private "coven") was working out an experiential three-dimensional study of the Tarot and of Aleister Crowley's version of the Qabbalah; her vision of personal intimacy with the images of the Tarot was a spiritual revelation to me that's all over this short booklet. The title and cover art are references to the syncretic "7 African Powers" prayer card of spiritualist/botanica-style Santeria: the Orishas of Yoruba religion are combined with iconographic Catholic saints in a way that manages to be both cartoonishly simple and a profound statement about the universality of spiritual experience.

Here are a few of the poems. Perhaps the omitted ones will make an appearance here later. With the benefit of many years hindsight, I've edited a couple of these. They're my poems; I'm entitled!

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My Seven African Powers
by Ian Scott Horst
Six of Swords Press, 1993

How odd and wonderful it is that we each walk that path anew, and sometimes, when our feet land in stony fossil indentations, we say, "Aha!" thus remembering, until the glint of a golden sun blinds us to all but its shining presence.

STEPS
Each moment is a crossroads--
there we dance
possibility and danger
promise and regret,
hope and forgetfulness.
There the past is not relived
nor the future predicted--
instead the sweaty brilliance
of the now is embraced
its dizzy terrifying vertigo
revealing steps,
in pattern yet unknown,
on solid earth and level grade,
that in their steady fall
guide each beating heart
to its content
(February 9993)

MY SEVEN AFRICAN POWERS
With heart of amber
And lens of amethyst
Ruby-shod
I reach for the mirror
Emerald fingers
Wrapped in silver
Rivers of hot indigo
Animating glassine flesh

Inner visioned eyes tilt
Balance fails...I shudder

And golden tongues, shimmering, dancing,
Change yearning to black dust

No longer reflected
But real.
(January 9993)

ODE TO DIONYSUS & CHANGO
It begins like fever,
Wet hot skin heaving,
breath short quick, quivering.

The pulse-kindled flame that
Spreads outward
Engulf hips
Dizzies legs
Shuts eyes inward
Reaches, grasps at things that cool.

Transformed, I am one
With sad, inebriate madness
With visioned and welcomed fate.

Bitter tears tasted
Reveal edges felt,
And tested skin, like tight gloves
Stretched, regretfully confined
Now in this brief combustion
A delirious rhythm graces
Feet bare and feeling.

Beat-beat pause beat-beat.

My heart, wild and cruel,
lies throbbing on stone.
I grasp it.

One, in this red hot
Driven blur
Of
Dancing fire that eats need
and
Gives birth to love.
(January 9993)

ECOLOGY
I hear electricity. The waves roll and bounce.
I see, as in a mirror, a chrome and plastic lie, blue-tinted.
I touch glass and metal, reading, brailled, not the thing but its ghost.
I breathe raspy, wet and shallow, acrid piss and vivisected flower.
I taste ash and thirst.

I dance in concrete fields. My legs break and snap. I sink into shimmering, rainbow-shining mire.

And shit and
blood and
bottles and
rinds and broken
things become my
sustenance. And my
arm, rising, is blackened, ashen.

As in a memory, I saw a circle.
What was taken, was given back.
What was given back, remained to be shared again.

The memory wrinkles.
The mirror splits and grates.
And the bloom turns to poison,
acid, bitter, sad.
And I am witness.
(Samhain 9992)

THIS JOURNEY
And suffered pains
And griefs give way
On the dawning of that day

These weary shoulders,
Their secret burdens released
No longer shrugged nor stooped
Now move in breath's
Steady rhythmed motions

For this journey shuffles
Mud-caked souls to the embrace
Of some remembered destination
And yields...

...Hope.
(Winter 9993)

Echoes of a past life: A Matter of Life and Death

This week's disappointing vote in New York State over marriage equality, and the resultant gloating by right-wing anti-gay forces like the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), set me to look again in my files at an earlier age of activism. I found a flyer I wrote for the Revolutionary Socialist League in 1981. It was distributed at a memorial protest. I've also found my account of its distribution. This is from the internal "BULLETIN of the RSL National Office" Vol. 9, No. 7, Pt. 1, December 4, 1981:

"On Thursday, November 19, the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights (CLGR) sponsored a memorial service and candle-light march for the first anniversary of the shootings at the Ramrod last year. We drafted a leaflet for the events, and [me, Steve Rose, Albert Torres and Michael Botkin from Chicago--ish] attended for the League...The organizers of the Memorial Service kept insisting to us that the event was not political, therefore they didn't appreciate us passing out our leaflet, and we were forced to distribute it downstairs from the Gay Synagogue where it was being held. The main speakers for the service didn't show up, however, and those who did speak (mainly from the CLGR) again and again said 'This is a political issue.' During the march we were hassled by Steve Ault, Eleanore Cooper and Betty Santoro of the CLGR for being too political (we had two of our flags). At one point CLGR tried to force us out of the march, but their attempt was feeble and we stayed in. We said it was our right to mourn with red flags rather than candles if we chose. This 'non-political' march wound up marching to Mayor Koch's Village apartment for a pep-rally for the City Gay Rights Bill, which would be coming up in the City Council the next day..."

That makes me laugh: incompetent and dishonest activist leadership wasn't invented yesterday! Anyway the leaflet isn't signed by me...it was an official RSL publication, but it's pretty clearly in my voice. It gives me great pause to see that in this completely pre-AIDS slice of ephemerata the issue of right-wing haters facing off with the gays remains front and center. But it also needs to be said that its fiery "fight-back" rhetoric, echoed today by a different generation of activists (albeit without the Leninist sheen) seems as generically well-intentioned as it is empty of specific actual prescription, and that doesn't seem to have changed. Today's gay community's frustration with President Obama's seemingly incomplete intentions conjures up for me this same kind of enraged powerlessness, but with the perspective of having seen it all before.

For all that hasn't changed, it should be said that a lot has. There weren't openly gay TV talk show hosts back then; no queer eyes for straight guys; heck the New York Times didn't even actually use the word "gay." I'm really pained that people would actually vote against the civil right of marriage for gays, but frankly, I don't feel all that oppressed. I mean, outside of the current economic crisis' terrifying and painful seige of my career and standard of living. There are a lot of terrible things happening in the world, but I feel free to kiss my boyfriend casually on the street without having to conjure up even the slightest bit of "fuck you if you don't like it." Maybe the world needs more revolutionaries like I was at the tender age of 23 when I wrote this, or maybe the world keeps on spinning whether or not we urge it on, eventually getting some things right.

There's a lot in this leaflet that makes me cringe. There's a painfully inept attempt at sarcasm; there's the trademark left-wing equation-building on questionably-generalized fear-mongering evidence of the inexorable efforts of the "system" to keep the "oppressed" down; there's the Leninist didacticism, even filtered through the RSL's attempt keep its message accessible. But anyway here's the text of the leaflet I wrote, it's certainly food for thought:

----

A Matter of Life and Death
by the Revolutionary Socialist League
undated (December 1981)

It's been one year since two gay men were machine-gunned to death in front of the Ramrod by a right-wing bigot. One year since Jiog [Jorg --ish]Wenz and Vernon Kroenig died simply because...they were gay, and happened to be in the wrong place (Christopher & West Street!) at the wrong time. Crumpley, the assassin, said at the time, "I want to kill them all. I'll kill them all, the gays. They're no good. They ruin everything." Crumpley was there at the wrong time too: he had planned to go on his spree on the weekend, when more gay people would be hanging out on the street where he could shoot them. But he was so impatient he couldn't wait for the weekend.

One year ago, the lesbian and gay community marched with candles and flowers. Tonight, the lesbian and gay community pays its respects and remembers its dead with candles and prayers. But these are not enough. Our lives are at stake here: our right to be open about who we are; our right to walk the streets, our right to live without fearing attack. The candles did not prevent the Nazis from visiting West Street last spring to celebrate. Candles will not prevent other deaths, other attacks. Unfortunately, Wenz and Kroenig were not the first gay people to die for being gay; and unfortunately, as long as we place our trust in candles, they will not be the last.

The fact us, all over the country oppressed people have been coming under attack. And while many lesbians and gay men may not feel oppressed -- after all they're not "sick" like transvestites, transsexuals, prostitutes or those into cross-generational sex -- those who hate us do not distinguish between us; we are all "perverts," and we all do not "deserve" to exist as we do. A year ago Black children were being murdered in Atlanta, Black people were being murdered in Buffalo, Klansmen were going on shooting sprees in many places throughout the country. This kind of racist violence continues, a year later. A year ago, Ronald Reagan had just been elected with the help of the Moral Majority, a force which believes it holds the supreme right to dictate how people live. A year later, the Moral Majority prospers under Reagan's government. The Moral Majority seeks to make biogotry respectable, and seeks to use its influence in government to make its views law. The Moral Majority also believes our lives are at stake here. Dean Wycoff of the Santa Clara California Moral Majority said, "I believe in capital punishment -- and I believe homosexuality is one of the things that could be coupled with murder and other sins." Anti-abortion legislation, the Family Protection Act, and other right-wing government lobbying efforts are just the beginning of what we can expect. The Moral Majority is only part of a general atmosphere in this country; when people begin to say they believe gay people should be killed, then we should hardly be surprised when people begin to act upon that belief.

What can we do to protect ourselves? Many in the lesbian and gay community (in New York, and elsewhere) believe that if only we can pass enough pro-gay legislation in government, then we will be creating safeguards and protection; that we can end discrimination and bigotry through "gay rights bills." Certainly it would be good if such bills were passed. But there is a problem. Murder is illegal in this country; but there are many this fact didn't help. The murderers of Harvey Milk, Jiog wenz and Vernon Kroenig didn't let that fact bother them (and in fact, both these murderers got off easy). The Klansmen who killed leftists in North Carolina two years ago didn't think twice about murder laws, and they got off scott-free. It is a safe bet that any law is only as effective as the ruling class, who enforces it, wants it to be. And since there's no way the ruling class can keep itself in power without racism and bigotry, those laws aren't going to do a hell of a lot of good. In order to survive, capitalism --the system in the U.S. today --need to keep the vast majority of the people divided against each other. Racism and bigotry are thus fundamentally ingrained into the way the system works.

Some people, including those of us in the Revolutionary Socialist League, believe we have another answer. We believe there is a way to protect our lives and our rights. We believe it's time to fight back.

Fighting back means building a movement that stands for the freedom of all those attacked by the system and the bigots who support it. Fighting back means uniting oppressed and working people around the cause of human liberation: lesbian and gay liberation, women's liberation, Black liberation; the liberation of Latino, Asian and other "ethnic minorities," the liberation of young people. Fighting back means organizing ourselves, making it clear that we, as the oppressed, are not to be messed with. Fighting back means militant struggle: both responding to government threats with shows of strength and showing willingness to defend ourselves against attacks from bigots. Fighting back means standing up for ourselves, fighting for what we need and not waiting for someone else to save us. And fighting back means overthrowing the capitalist system and replacing it with one that serves our needs and guarantees our freedom.

The closet that many of us left stands with its doors wide open, waiting for us to return. But it doesn't have to be that way. Nor do we have to pay for our openness with our lives. Even if we are forced back into the closet, the general social attack on the oppressed will not stop -- there are no closets for Black people and others. Sooner or later, when the right-wing bigots finish with the others on their hit list, they'll find us behind those closet doors. But by then it will be too late -- we will be divided and alienated from the other oppressed people, with whom, united, we could have resisted. It's time to fight back now -- it's a matter of life and death.

Hatred rules the day in New York

Marriage equality was voted down in New York State yesterday. I watched at work as heroic senator after heroic senator gave incredibly moving testimonials about why marriage equality ("gay marriage") should be passed. Only one senator had the guts to speak against it. Yet in the end, it wasn't even close, 38 opposed and only 24 in favor.

Here is one of the amazing courageous voices:


But somehow speeches like this one weren't enough to touch the hardened hearts of an apparent majority of politicians who love their hatred more than their constituents.

So gay people are good enough to pay these senators' salaries. Good enough to pay disproportionately high amounts of taxes that go from relatively rich downstate areas to relieve the bankrupt and backwards upstate areas. But not not enough to get the same civil rights that straight people enjoy. Not a single republican voted for the measure, and 8 democrats also opposed it, mostly from Queens here in NYC. Our corrupt republican Mayor Bloomberg -- who was just reelected with a lot of gay support -- claims to support marriage equality but gives hundreds of thousands of his own dollars to upstate republicans who oppose it is fully culpable here.

I have no plans to get married; I'm not sure it's the best choice of goals as a community. But this hurts. Hatred rules the day once more.

US Out of Afghanistan!

President Obama is wrong. The continuation of the war in Afghanistan will solve nothing. More people will die: if some of them are would-be "terrorists" more of them will be innocents. Irreplaceable innocents.

Afghanistan has a complicated recent history, proving nothing so much as the continued meddling of "great powers" outside their borders brings home a legacy of death and misery: both for those in the nations wrecked by the tracks of tanks and the stench of gunpowder and blood and for the citizenry of those in the "great powers" themselves faced with the backwash of terrorism and the threat of economic collapse.

The President was the first "peace" candidate to win his office campaigning against a war; and while it must be said Obama never pledged to withdraw from Afghanistan as he did from Iraq, he has clearly failed to follow through with that mandate of a war-weary American population.

The troops need to come home; all of them.

World AIDS Day, 2009: Online Immortality?

December 1 is World AIDS Day.

The GLBT History Archive in conjunction with the Bay Area Reporter is launching an online obituary archive here, which should prove painfully fascinating, helping us remember those we have lost by giving them a presence online. I google my lost friends every now and then, wondering if they are granted online immortality.

I came up with these two links yesterday, though they're somewhat oblique. My friend Michael Botkin was my roommate in my last apartment in Chicago. We joined the RSL at about the same time, and he was dating Joe Galanti/Alongi, one of the leading members at the time. Michael's experience in the League ended badly: he seems to have been summarily drummed out of the group, whereas I sort of wandered away. Anyway, in the 1980s Michael went on to write for the ground breaking subversive journal Processed World, which covered the experience of working for a living in a newly computerized world from a truly human--and humane--perspective. Writing as "Kwazee Wabbit," Michael tied his experiences in the RSL to this brave new world, and the results are an entertaining read, albeit a sobering one.

Here's one article entitled "Progressive Pretensions" in which Michael documents the rude awakening of discovering that the good guys aren't always the good guys. Here's another called "The Art of the Purge" in which he tells the story of being purged from both the RSL and from an academic setting. His obituary from Poz Magazine is here; he died in 1996. Sadly I don't have a picture of Michael and wasn't able to find one online.

Most of us who are gay do not have children to carry on our stories. With so many lives cut so tragically short by the ravages of this disease, it becomes doubly important for those of us who have survived the past era to carry on their stories--the stories of our beloved friends--to the future. Always remember.

(If you haven't read my story of Steve Rose, today would be a good day to do so!)
---

Update: thanks to the above referenced database (which doesn't seem to work in Firefox), here's an excerpt from Michael's obit, with a photo. Thanks to the BAR & the internet.

Echoes of a past life: Healing Darkness

Here's another piece from the Queer Pagans 'Zine: the longest one I wrote. It covers a lot of ground, touching on some pivotal moments in my spiritual journey. It's interesting to me that I chose not to identify the specific goddess archetype I felt I was interacting with until the last portion of this piece. Although I felt devoted to Hecate/Hekate, it became less and less important to me that the spiritual energy I experienced bore any name tied to a specific pantheon. My spiritual practice yielded more information about this divine force than my attempted research of the historical record of the ancient Hellenes or medieval witches. It's also ironically funny to me that as far removed as I now feel from the Neo-Pagan path and its community, the tattoo of Hecate's wheel that I had etched into my arm in this period is still there begging explanation from those who see it and ask about it. Anyway, the word "God" is much shorter and less suspicious, and if it causes its own kind of confusion, these days I much prefer it to the more exotic and complicatedly capitalized constructions of these earlier words. Note: I've added a few parenthetical details here and there in this piece to flesh out details, noted in italics.

Healing Darkness: A Meditation in Three Parts
By Ian Scott Horst
from QP #15, Halloween 9994 [Fall 1994]

Part 1: Vows and Promises

Of all the God/dess, one came to me first, and for that I will be ever grateful.

A friend of mine lay dying. He was thin, and his skin seemed tight and brittle. I tried talking to him, but I wasn't sure he heard me. His gaze was no longer full of the man I knew, but something focused far away from where I sat, holding his flaccid hand.

It would make a great story to say that as we sat there, a goddess descended into the hospital room, bore him aloft, and held me in her healing embrace. But it was not like that at all.

He died a couple days later and his family repossessed his body, shunned his gay friends and lovers at his funeral, and tried to throw his lover out of their apartment.

John's death happened at a time when I was trying to figure out a lot of things for myself. I found myself outliving some important friends and many treasured beliefs and unsure of my footing. The spiritual crisis I had been dodging for several years descended upon me, forcing me to examine who I was, what I was doing, what I wanted, why I was.

The short version of the story is that I discovered Paganism, and immersed myself it it, this new part of myself aware and longing for satiety. But I didn't understand a lot of things: while the Divine presence was easy enough to feel alone under a Full Moon in Prospect Park, it was harder to pull from the myths and rituals of the traditions I was trying to understand.

Then I discovered Her. As John [Moroney -ish]'s death became a part of my life, I realized that death is always a part of life. In fact, without death there is no life. Without the darkness there is no lightness. I meditated on these things and pondered what happens in the crossroads.

And all of a sudden, that which had felt abstract about Paganism became real. And suddenly She touched me in such a way as to convince me of Her beingness. And Her touch was not sweetness and light, no, but the darkness of sleep and the night, the power of She Who Changes.

Her darkness was not the darkness of evil or the macabre. I was not tempted to trade my chalice for a skull goblet or festoon myself with black lipstick. But She was about death, about understanding its place in life, about accepting its challenge, about the balance which is the natural order of things.

And although the truths She taught me began to heal me from the wounds I had suffered, Her presence began to be a bit more than I could bear. To consider death at every turn, to marvel at its purpose, to wonder at its finality, to embrace its inevitability; these were not easy things.

And so I conceived of a plan: I volunteered to perform a public ritual [for New York New Moon, an open circle--ish]. She Herself had taught it to me: a re-creation of Her crossroads, a place to meet Her, to appease Her, to open to Her healing touch, to offer and to learn.

I would organize this ritual, I would introduce Her to anyone who came, and then I would say goodbye to Her, ridding myself of what was beginning to feel like a burden.

It was the first public ritual I ever led, and it was a great success. Many people came, and to the surprise of those of us who organized it, it raised tremendous power; power which I felt but had no idea what to do with. When it was over many people came up to me to say how grateful they were.

The following weekend I went to a Pagan gathering [the Earthspirit Community's Twilight Covening--ish]. Also attending were many of the people who had organized and attended the ritual. But there was problem, my friends said. One woman had had a traumatic experience in the ritual. An old health problem had resurfaced, and she felt that the poorly grounded energy of the ritual was responsible. I apologized for my inexperience. But no, it's not just that, I was told. This woman thinks that she has been cursed by Her, the Goddess invoked at the crossroads in the circle. Would I, they wanted to know. please ask Her to remove the whammy that this woman had received.

And so I went alone to cast a circle, to recreate the crossroads, to call Her down, to perform the ritual I thought I was free of.

Exhausted from the gathering, and in choking clouds of incense I called Her. She came. And She spoke to me. She told me that it was an illusion to think I could be free of Her. I must embrace Her, and only then would I find healing and what I sought. Each dark of the moon, she made me swore, I would call her. I would honor Her. I would recreate Her crossroads, burn Her a black candle, sing Her healing song. She would be my friend and companion. She would be the night that I carried with me into the day.

No I was not free to refuse. I made the promise, the vow. And I waited for morning.

Part 2: Crows

I called it, in my journal, crow-woman, but it never felt comfortable around my neck. And maybe that was the point.

I bought it because I had been working, I thought, with Her crows. It had yellow and red and black beads, and three black crow feathers dangling from it. And a dozen withered black crows' feet spaced between the beads: grim amputated curling claws. It was a necklace. It had been made out west, by an Indian, I was told. It was much too intense a thing to be called jewelry.

I waited for it to come alive. I carried it to our dark moon rituals, where we called Her to come to us. I waited for its whisper. The scratch of its talons on my flesh when I put it around my neck made my skin crawl, but it remained silent.

When I went to the mountains of North Carolina one autumn, the whisper came. It said: take me along. And so I packed crow-woman with my ritual essentials and flew off -- no black bird but silver steel -- to a gay spiritual retreat.

Let me say here only that the retreat [Gay Spirit Visions --ish] was life-changing: an exploration of gay spiritual consciousness and a lesson in personal self-worth and affirmation.

At the retreat I met a man, whose full name I now struggle to call to my mind. He was called Raven. He had pale pale skin and jet black hair. He was an Indian, he said. He was not beautiful to me, but he was strangely magnetic and compelling; hos face bore traces of many burdens. He was one of the organizers of the retreat, and he had much cause over the weekend to speak to the hundred or so of us gathered there.

One of the climaxes of the retreat was a dance around the fire to the beat of drums. The beat was not wild and free, but carefully measured. And I could hear it from the distance as I walked the path from my cabin toward the central hall, the high mountain night wrapped dark around.

And in a spot of light -- my memory does not tell me if it was moonlight or starlight or flashlight -- I heard a whisper. It said: "give it to him."

When I hear a whisper in that part of my mind I usually try to dissuade it. If the whisper responds "OK, do what you want," I know it to be one of those little voices called self-doubt that are best ignored.

But the whisper said, "Yes, I'm sure. You know who I am and I say give it to him." By this time I knew what He was talking about, who he was talking about, and Who He was whispering to me in the mountain night.

So I turned around and went back to my cabin, and pulled the necklace from its black cloth wrapping. And I returned along the path to the fire. There gay men in various stages of trance and undress writhed in the orange light of a crackling fire.

I went up to Raven and said that I needed to talk to him. The whoops of the dancers and the pounding of the drums made us strain to hear.

I said, "I don't understand this. But I have to give you something," and I held up the necklace, its wrinkled claws dark and shiny in the firelight. "I have this god who follows me around. I don't know why, really, but I think he's Eleggua, an African deity. Anyway, he said that I have to give this to you. It's not old or anything. But it is sacred, and I have never learned to use it."

He looked at me oddly, as anyone in that situation would. But he took the necklace. He told me that he had heard of the god I was talking about. He said his teacher was a Heyoka, the Lakota word for trickster. He said to me, "You know this is a very heavy thing to give to me."

I could only nod and shrug.

He thanked me gravely, and returned to the fire. I returned after a while to my cabin. I felt like something had happened that I didn't quite understand. Something karmic had passed, it was clear, but mostly I felt that I had done a justice to crow-woman, freeing a sacred object whose power needed to be undestood from an unfortunate fate as a trinket bought and sold for money.

In the remaining day of the retreat Raven and I did not talk, in fact, I would say he avoided me. My own burdens seemed oddly lightened, though, and I experienced in the gathering's final ritual an important revelation (the reporting of which I'll leave to another time} which has strengthened me since.

But I learned, finally, the message that Her crows bring.

More than a year passed. I was unable to return for the retreat's annual gathering. Already it was Spring and I received a mailing from the retreat's organizers about a memorial gathering. A memorial for Raven, who had died of AIDS in the winter passed.

The crows are black, and their voices are loud and shrill. They fly in flocks, dark and shiny. Wrinkled and curved talons curl around branches, around bone. Their beaks are sharp, singing songs that cannot be sung. The crows fly carrying Her message. Their burden is unbearable, yet it must be borne.

Pay attention to the crows.

Part 3: Hekate, She Oh Mother, She

Her season is High Autumn. Amidst the falling leave, the shortening days and the chilling air, we speak of the veil between the worlds growing thin. At this time the dead walk the earth as our memories are stirred. At this time She calls to Her children to embrace Her, to walk with Her for a season.

My coven [called the Coven of the Middle Pillar--ish] was planning our ritual for Halloween, for Samhain, for Her holiday, and it was this we leanred when we needed Her presence in a more real, more dramatic way. We realized that one of us would have to agree to take Her on for Her season: that is, to open ourselves to Her, to invite Her to stay with us, speak through us, to change us. And so the crows cawed.

The second year it was my turn to embrace Her, and like my predecessor, when the time came I put on the snake rings that were Her symbol.

In one week I called to Her in three rituals; in each one invoking Her presence in me for the duration of the ritual and for the season. Despite my vow of three years before, I was no prepared for the intensity of the experience. Despite the fact that my coven had formed around our mutual devotion to Her, I was not prepared for the vividness of living with Her in that way. There were many surprises.

What happened was that everything in my life was put on the crossroads. As though a jeweller examining facets through a glass, I was given cause to examine each and every facet of my life. Some I left at the crossroads. Some I gathered up. A flaw here or there led me in search of correction. A particular flicker led me to prideful satisfaction. Fortunately the deaths in my life proved only metaphorical this time, though many of them were painful, as change is wont to be, necessary thing that it is.

And so the winter passed into spring, and the changes began to sprout roots, to depeen.

And then in a whirling moment, the unexpected. It was another ritual. Though I carried Her in my breast, it was not She whose name we called. But I remember being in a trance, moving, maybe singing; dancing among my covenmates also moving, making noise, all of us directed to that inner place where we find our link to Her.

And a voice began to whisper in my head: "Now is the time," it said. "The time has come for changes. This is the crossroads, now, and you must choose." And I found myself ripping snake rings off my fingers. And snapping pentacle chains off my nexk. And She released me.

She, Hekate. Oh Mother, She.

She let me go. She flung me out of her dark embrace, changed, healed. And I realized a time in my life had ended, a season of trial and change passed. I went for a kind if psychic reading, and the man who listened to the whipser of spirits told me to wear more white clothing. He saw me leaving a veiled black figure behind. My path now feels different than before, and while this year I will not don Her black veils and robes, nor light Her black candles, I can never forget that I owe who I have become to Her dark whispers.

On the surface of things Hekate's message is very simple: Without death there is no life. That is, life feeds on life; in order for new life to come into the world, old life must end, and pass its spark of life-force on. The truth of this is revealed in as simple an act as eating, when one being (animal or vegetable) consumes the lifeforce of another -- vegetable or animal -- in order to sustain its own life force. But what this reveals about us, people, queer people, you, me, is the divine part: We're part of a sacred dance of the stars: the life force that fires suns is the same that grows cucumbers and animates our bodies. In this knowledge is a healing gift. The mud and the crows and my dead friends (and yours) and me and you we're all the same, really, the spiral dance of our atoms showing, in miraculous imagining, Her presence in all things, and bearing, in the richness of its season fruit of grace and balance and patience and inner peace.

But words are only signs. Words and symbols are not the things themselves, nor their true knowing, and these words, while shared, are certainly mine and not yours, and this is why Hekate is mistress of magic, the only real way to understand Her voice. Go to Her Crossroads and dare to listen. And in the tears and trials and wonders, may you find... yourself.

Steve Rose, gay hero

I ran across this photo when trying to do some research on the mind-control-cult-masquerading-as-political-party once known as the New Alliance Party and now more or less known as a faction of the Independence Party here in New York. It shows a one-time roommate of mine, Steve Rose, with his boyfriend at the time--Tato--at a "Dump Koch" rally in the mid or late 1980s. It was on a website of former members of the NAP on a page labelled "People exploited by the NAP." By the time this photo had been taken, my friendship with Steve had ended; I wasn't really a part of his life in his final years when he succumbed to AIDS. But the picture has brought back so many memories of Steve and what an amazing guy he was. I wanted to put down some memories of him because he's one of those unsung heroes of an earlier time: somebody whose heart was in this amazing place but whose struggle ended not with victory or even recognition but with the tragic anonymity of so many gay men of that earlier time.

Steve Rose grew up in upstate New York, in the small town of Chittenango. He was close to his mother, but as someone who knew he was gay from an early age always described his hometown as a hotbed of ignorance and intolerance. His best friend committed suicide as a teen; Steve believed it was because he couldn't handle his own awareness of being gay in such a hostile environment. He moved to New York City in the late 1970s. I don't know where he went to nursing school, but he become an RN at Harlem Hospital. He wanted more than anything to help people; and he loved his job taking care of people there. He used to tell me about cleaning up homeless junkies in humanizing a way that made me think he felt kinship with other castoffs from society.

Steve loved the city; and he loved the freedom it gave him as a gay man. He told me a LOT of stories about his sex life in those heady days. He loved the bars and discos, the baths, the piers, the cars, the trucks, the late-night streets. It was Candyland to him. He was brash, extroverted, and shameless. Somewhere in the late seventies he met and moved in with Albert Torres, who was a few years older than Steve, but devoted to him. They lived together in Inwood/Washington Heights for many years.

Steve joined the Gay Activists Alliance, one of two main gay political groups in NYC in the late 1970s. GAA was the militant group engaging in factional warfare with the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights--CLGR--the more established group which seemed to them more accomodationist and mainstream. GAA was hugely involved in the noisy protests against the filming of William Friedkin's 1980 slasher movie "Cruising" in Greenwich Village.

It's hard to remember that earlier time of gay invisibility, but the community was outraged that gay invisibility in populture culture was about to be replaced with a depiction of gay society as a dangerous, doomed world of murderers and perverts. You can hear the whistles the protesters used to attempt to disrupt the filming of the movie in at least one scene: they were left in by Friedkin and provide a kind of haunting ghostly testament to a flashpoint of old gay activism.

Round about then the Revolutionary Socialist League, a split from the International Socialists in the U.S. with a reputation for direct action (that some would call adventurism), had begun a campaign of work in the gay community. It had won a minority faction of a gay socialist group in California called the Red Flag Union (once the Lavender and Red Union: the majority faction merged with the Spartacist League), and it was eager to create a left-wing pole in the burgeoning gay liberation movement. The RSL started to "intervene" in GAA. "Intervention" was the term used by left-wing sects for having an orientation to a certain political arena, or, if possible, joining a sympathetic coalition and attempting to win adherents to the party program. This is where I enter the story as well: though I was not yet in New York at the time, the RSL's work with GAA was a strong factor in my joing the RSL in 1979 or so.

Anyway, Steve was a true radical. It was clear to him that rights were not won by begging, but by fighting. He was attracted to the RSL's support for militancy, and eventually to the RSL's brand of unorthodox revolutionary Leninism. He was not an intellectual: he struggled with Marxist literature and concepts. His upstate NY education had not exposed him to the history and geography crucial to the arguments of the left, but he knew what he stood for. He loved the RSL's militancy: he loved its stand against the KKK and neo-nazis. GAA exploded; splitting into left and right-wing factions before ultimately disbanding: the left becoming sympathetic to the RSL. I believe Bruce Glauber was the principle RSL member leading the intervention. Although most of the GAA guys only remained peripherally around the RSL, Steve and Albert and at least one other joined the League outright.

I moved to New York in 1981. My skill designing printed materials for the Chicago branch had come to the attention of the national office, and the main guy who designed the RSL's newspaper together, The Torch/La Antorcha, himself an SDS veteran, wanted to give it a rest. I was brought to New York to be the Art Director of the paper.

Steve and I immediately hit it off. We were both big guys, and more or less the same age, if I recall. We became friends. I was looking for someone to show me the ropes of gay and political life in the big city, and Steve showed me his world. Although I had been out for several years, and had spent a number of years in the organized left, I felt shy and inexperienced in the gay world. Steve opened my eyes, and I'm so grateful to have had the experience of that pre-AIDS gay world before it was gone. I'll never forget the year we went to the Halloween parade in drag together: he looked like a hooker and I looked like an out-of-place midwestern schoolteacher on her one night out. There are numerous photos in some Japanese business men's photo albums documenting that night. As fun as it was to hang out with Steve socially, he was a dynamic presence at demonstrations, and a great contributor to internal discussions in the League.

This photo is probably from 1983 or 1984. Note the rat tail. That's me on the left, and Steve on the right.


Steve had his share of demons. Heavy most of his life, he discovered bulimia could solve all his problems, at least temporarily. He used to consume two packages of pasta and two jars of sauce and four liters of Pepsi every night; half way through and again at the end it would all be upchucked into the toilet. Being skinnier made him even more extroverted and gave him a kind of sexual swagger: his appetite for men was as voracious as his appetite for food, and Albert didn't really have a problem with recreational sex. (He had a "tummy tuck" after the success of his bulimia, though there was some horrible episode of lots of bleeding. Anyway as the years went by he got big again.)

Steve's favorite song was Bette Midler's "The Rose." He used to say the lyric "[It's] the soul afraid of dyin' that never learns to live" made him not want to become someone trapped in a life of fear and regret.

Albert was an alcoholic, and after a long period of abstention descended into a fairly unpleasant period of insobriety. He was hit by a car in the village and while he recovered, his life was never the same. Somewhere in there Steve and Albert broke up, and Steve and I became roommates in an apartment overlooking the George Washington Bridge.

It proved to be a bad match: by then our friendship had developed a kind of competitive edge. On my part I had some complicated love/hate issues; and he began dating a friend of mine which brought up some jealousy. What had been a fairly intense friendship became a fairly toxic living situation, and it didn't last long. Somewhere in 1984, Steve moved back in with Albert and I moved off to Brooklyn.

Albert had gotten sick. Make that Sick. By then AIDS had a name but not a lot more. As I recall he didn't live that long after he got sick. Steve was devastated.

AIDS was a challenge, a gauntlet. It changed all of our lives, even those who remained healthy. I found myself drifting away from radical politics; by 1986 I stopped being active with the League. Steve by then had also left. We were no longer really friends. I wandered into him every once in a while in the Village. He seemed no longer his former brash self. The last time I saw him he was with Tato, and he had just joined the New Alliance Party. He seemed a little defeated: we both knew better, from experience, of what a nest of snakes the NAP actually was.

I guess I was surprised but not shocked. The NAP had succesfully created a working-class and multi-ethnic aura about itself, unlike the more orthodox left which was mostly white and not very proletarian. At the time NAP recruited through a mental healthcare center where the message was very attractive to someone like Steve: If your mind is fucked up it's not your fault, it's the system: you're being oppressed and you should fight back (by joing the New Alliance Party). NAP cult originator Fred Newman's called this "social therapy."

The orthodox left was dying anyway, and Steve couldn't stand to not be fighting. He hated Ed Koch, and loved the fact the NAP was heavily involved in the Dump Koch movement. If I recall the details correctly, he was the RN on the scene when the Rev. Al Sharpton was stabbed at a 1991 anti-racism demonstration in Brooklyn.

By then Steve himself had AIDS; he died in 1991 or 1992. I ran into Tato once on the street, who was heartbroken.

Steve deserved better than what he got. He showed me that it was possible to live life joyfully and freely without worrying what other people thought: to challenge convention and to be true to what's inside you. He was brave, even foolhardy. But without fighters like him, the last decades of increasing social acceptance of gay people wouldn't have happened. It's important for those of us who remember those who have gone to keep their names alive. We owe it to them.

My Great Great Grandfather

I've written elsewhere about the journey of my father's father's family from Russia to the United States. Here's a little bit about my father's mother's family. It's the most "American" branch of the family: unlike the immigrant Volga-Germans, German-Germans, Irish, and secret Jews comprising the rest of my ancestors, the Scott wing seems to have come to these shores before there was an actual United States. I was recently sent a box of old photos from my grandmother's estate--she's been gone a long time but these were floating around somewhere--and included is this amazing photo of my great great grandfather William W. Scott, of Vicksburg, Michigan. He's shown in his Union Army uniform in 1865. I don't have a lot of documentation of any of my family roots, but I know at least that William Scott was born in Indiana in 1844, and died in 1918. He was married to Maria Decker, and among his children was my grandmother Dorothy's father, Clinton R. Scott, a dentist in Marcellus, Michigan (who married Dora Kimble--sometimes spelled Kimball), born in 1868.

It's amazing to see this young man of 20 or 21, just before starting his family, perhaps on discharge from service in the cataclysm of the Civil War.

Here's another photo, undated, but apparently in some sort of parade in the 1910s. On the back is pencilled in "Dr. W. W. Scott".

The Scotts had lots of children. I'm sure my distant cousins are legion. I don't know when they settled in that part of Michigan: but my father was born there and my grandmother didn't leave there until the 1950s. My grandmother herself was one of many siblings: I met her oldest sister Ruth once, the beloved daughter of the family who died in the late 1960s or early 1970s, in a nursing home in California. The photos of the Scott children in the early 1900s show pampered middle-class children in tree-lined small town idle. My great aunt Frances Scott, gramma's sister, was a photographer--and more-or-less out lesbian--in Mill Valley, California from the 1950s through her passing in the 1980s. It makes me wonder, given this family blessing, what it would have been like to be gay in William W. Scott's generation: was it always a suppressed and hidden inner struggle, or were there blue-coated brothers in some former secret army of lovers?

Sarah Palin nation

More disturbing video from the know-nothing mob: white resentment, fear, bad thinking, Fox-news induced ignorance, mindless adulation of celebrity. It's hard to watch, but is it good or bad that all these "independent" minded white people continue to dance so close to the fine line between fascist and crazy?

Echoes of a past life: She/The

On one of the gay blogs I follow, Joe.My.God, there is a lot of hostility to religion. A lot of this is justified in that certain religious organizations have been in the forefront of organizing attempts to deny rights to lesbians and gays. But such a negative experience with religion is really not my own experience. Granted, I grew up in a liberal, largely secular atmosphere, in northern urban centers. But it's clear to me that many people have ceded spirituality to the fundamentalists, accepting their limited and intolerant views as being the true representations of religion rather than something else altogether. Fundamentalists may think they're being "truer" to the spirit of their religion than people who view religion more progressively, but this is only true if you believe that burning witches at the stake, stoning "sinners," or waging genocidal war under the banner of God are fair expressions of religion. But it's not the time of the Old Testament, or the flight from Mecca, or the Spanish inquisition, and the sun will rise tomorrow without the mass sacrifices of humans on stone pyramids. Thankfully, human values have evolved, just as our own views as people evolve over the course of our own lives.

This piece is another from the Queer Pagans zine. It's an attempt to define what God is, from a time when I was trying to move from what could be called book-learned polytheism to experience-taught monotheism. I remember the day my friend Cayte and I had this amazingly profound discussion when we both realized that all our of NeoPagan friends thought we were all being polytheists when we had both come to a realization that that was, for us, a superficial understanding of the world and a kind of impossibility. I offer this up now as a reminder that God, that religion, are not what the forces of reaction and hatred say they are. Their cartoon vision of judgment and sin and hatred and punishment might brighten their own worlds, but it need not darken our own. Let us drown our own baby in their dirty bathwater at our own risk.

Anyway, it's difficult to describe things that can only be experienced. But I think I give it a pretty good try.

She/The
by Ian Scott Horst
from QP #14, Harvest 9994 [Late-summer 1994]

It is an obvious fact that the human heart beats to its rhythms whether our minds tell it to or not. If you look inward and try to still the beating, it will return. Some might believe that it is the awesome electrical hardware of human anatomy that keeps the heart beating; the miraculous machine of brain, blood, lungs and body. The conclusion of such a belief is that the heart beats because of what is inside us. Yet external stimulation is absolutely essential to its steady and continued rhythm. Without the beauty of things outside our bodies, and without the proximity of other beating hearts, our own hearts grow thick and dull; hardening until eventually ceasing. Gaze at an orange sunset over the Hudson river and you wil feel your heart come to life and renew itself. So we might also say that the heart beats because of what is outside us.

My heart beats to the same rhythm as yours, though we do not always listen together, nor are the beats aligned to precisely the same moments, nor does the beat move us each in the same way. My cats have hearts that beat faster than mine, and intenal and external realities vastly different than mine. But they lie close to me, occasionally gazing into my eyes with recognition, absorbing the warmth of my heartbeats and offering the warmth of theirs in return.

I own a smooth black stone that fits neatly in my palm. It is wonderfully cool and perfectly shaped. I do not think that inside this stone there is a beating heart; tough I will not crack it open to find out. But when the stone fits into my palm and my fingers close around it the sound and feel of my own heartbeat become clear from the din of life's sensation. The gift of the stone is the boundary that enables one small part of infinity to be found and named.

There are god/desses of stones. And of hearts. And of cats. And of rhythms. There are god/desses whose names ring in my ears and fall flat in yours.

We Queer Pagans seek to understand the god/desses. We seek to align our lives with their miraculous and rewarding presences. We invoke them, we pray to them, we find them becoming near to us and as present in our lives as our shadows.

But sometimes these god/desses are not enough. Sometimes their miraculous personalities are too limited; each mythos too restricted; each shape both inadequate and too complex.

It is at that moment then that I ask you to find the space between the palm and the stone. Find the rhythm with which all heartbeats mesh. Find the world in which all things exist: both the ones you can see and the ones you can't; the ones you know of and the parts unknown.

This God/dess I worship by a simple and common name, as ubiquitous as She is. I call Her The. And I call Her, The God/dess, to be here now. And my invocation cannot fail.