Andrew Ramer has just published his collection of Queer Midrash, Queering the Text, in which he writes our stories back into the history — and the sacred texts — of the Jewish people.
Midrash is an ancient custom of creating stories the fill in the blank spaces, or explain the seeming contradictions in the Torah. The best example is the story almost all Jews know — that of Abraham smashing the statues of idols in his father's shop. Many Jews believe this story is in the Torah. It isn't. It was a midrach created by a rabbi centuries after the Torah was redacted into the form we have it today.
Midrash is kind of a sacred literary jazz riff on the story, giving it new meaning and relevance to later generations.
In the story Andrew reads in the video, he takes a text from Genesis and uses it as a window into the Biblical landscape to create a story of the first gay male lovers — and how their love was recognized as sacred.
Apologies for the poor quality of the image, but you can hear him read clearly, and if this kind of story is meaningful to you, you can be sure it will be a heart-opening experience. By rewriting the story, we can set ourselves free from the tyranny of the story. By recognizing it is a story created by others, we don't have to live out the old scripts — we can write new ones and truly live happily, in the moment, ever after.
For this the month of another birthday in my marvelously queer 50s, here's a sweet and smart little film that was presented in the Documentary Shorts section of NewFest this last June. If you like this film, be sure to join NewFest and come to events throughout the year as well as next year's lgbt film festival in NYC.
As one of the founding members of Gay Youth of NY, it's interesting to reconnect with the alumni and watch each other grow old, those that us who have survived. And this film raises many important issues for us and our community.
Can you imagine superheroes for lgbt rights in Colorado? If you can't, you aren't imaginative enough, because the GLBT Community Center of Colorado has just launched a website and a youtube cartoon featuring these spandex-wearing characters:
My only question is, where's Scoobie-Doo?
There is also a full website where you can sign on for updates and take advantage of viral email to let other people know.
You have only two opportunities to see a film about the most politically subversive and influential drag queen in living history (if not all history). Don't miss it — "Darling! The Pieter-Dirk Uys Story" will be part of the 18th Annual Jewish Film Festival, at the Walter Reade Theater on January 29th.
Uys is best known in the guise of his alter ego, Evita Bezuidenhout, the Most Famous White Woman in South Africa. During the later apartheid years, as Evita, Uys appeared regularly on television and in clubs satirizing the evil of the apartheid government. When people who spoke out and challenged the government directly were imprisoned or worse, Uys managed to speak truth to power without finding himself disappeared. Nelson Mandela himself has said that Uys is one if his heroes.
Allow me a tangential discussion of the Mattachine Society here, which Harry Hay named in honor of medieval buskers who appeared in masks and whose performances were often satirical jabs at the ruling classes. Jesters if you will, who have always had the ability to couch the truth humorously, for the most part without penalty. Clearly Uys is a living example of this tradition. And while the horrors of apartheid are over, as Evita Bezuidenhout, Uys continues to perform in schools throughout South Africa, teaching children about how to protect themselves from AIDS, something the ANC government, with an HIV denialist health minister, has most strenuously not done.
This documentary film follows Uys as he goes from school to school. It gives something of his life story (we learn half way through, just as Uys only learned as an adult, that his mother was a Jewish refugee from Berlin).
In some ways, the making of this documentary is also an amazing story. The director, Julian Shaw, a
native New Zealander, saw Uys perform on a trip to South Africa when he was 15 years old. He went up to Uys after the performance and said he was coming back to make a documentary film about him. Uys was nice to him, but didn’t think he’d ever see the boy again. Except that two years later, Shaw showed up, camera in hand. For the next two years he shadowed him, capturing footage in schools, performances and at home. Another couple of years of editing later, and the finished film has won honors at documentary film festivals in Australia.
Truth be told (though I am not in drag and you wouldn't want to see it) the film is far from perfect. But the story of Uys is compelling, as is the story of Shaw deciding to film him. I wish there had been more about Uys in the apartheid days, and more about Shaw’s life and his need to make this movie.
Quibbles. This film is a must see — and a mirror to what the gender clowns (this is meant very respectfully) in New York should aspire to. The closest we have is the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, whose true charity work is masked by the drag clowning and whose serious challenge to organized religion is made more acceptable by the fact that men have feminized themselves.
There are all kinds of questions I have: does drag take away a man’s power and thus make it safe for him to speak the truth. Or is it the taking on the the feminine power that enables them to speak the truth? What do you think?
What’s even more interesting to me as an advertising copywriter is Uys appearance in a recent commercial for Nando’s, a fast food chain in South Africa. In this clever spot, Uys as Evita delivers a sell for a special meal deal, while setting up a very pointed political barb that comes as a stinger at the end of the spot. While such a jab at the current government (Uys is an equal opportunity satirist) is no surprise coming from Evita, I am amazed that the advertiser was willing to chance government disapproval. Certainly no advertiser in the U.S. would make such an obviously negative statement about either the Democrats or Republicans in a commercial. The spot runs below:
Ruth is one of my heroes — New York lost when we didn't elect her mayor. But the world won, since she went on the lead a truly great humanitarian organization, American Jewish World Service.
I remember the first time I saw her, handing out leaflets outside Zabar's, running for City Council from a very left 3rd party. Of course, she didn't win in that race. But soon she was inside the Democratic Party and raising hell when she did get on the Council from my nabe, jewish left central, the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Ruth is 68 today. And I am sure the results of Tuesday's election was present enough for her. But best wishes from this old supporter and left handed/left headed queer Jewish Buddhist. Image credit: Chrystie Sherman
Laura Huxley was 96 when she died the other day. Most people know her husband Aldous Huxley, the man who gave us Brave New World. But Mrs. Huxley did not live in her husband's shadow — the NY Times noted in their obituary that:
Over the years, Mrs. Huxley was also a concert violinist; a freelance
filmmaker; a lay psychotherapist; a self-help author; the head of a
children’s foundation; a lecturer on the human potential movement; and,
in her words, a restrained investigator of LSD.
And it is on the subject of self-help author I want to take a moment to remember her, since a number of years ago I came across her book "You Are Not The Target" at the Strand and bought it in a flash. The last line of the Times obit mentions some essays in that book with just a touch of condescension:
The book offers a set of what Mrs. Huxley called recipes for getting
through life’s many difficulties. These include punching a tetherball,
imagining one’s own funeral and dancing in the nude.
Sounds, like so much self-help writing, rather airy-fairy. Well this fairy jubu was very taken with her "recipes" and most particularly with the essay called Dance Naked With Music. Here is an excerpt — try it
and change your life:
Go into a room by yourself. Put on your favorite music. Throw off your clothes. And dance.
For one hour, in complete privacy, you are going to be naked — physically, emotionally, and psychologically.
This may seem to you an extraordinary thing to do. I agree that most people do not ordinarily shut themselves into a room and dance naked. Nevertheless, put aside shyness, reserve, convention — and do this recipe. There are sound principles behind it, and good values to be gained from it.
You are going to set your body free of all its limitations and inhibitions, set it free to feel the music, to move with it, to be at one with it.
This is not an artistic undertaking, so do not judge yourself. Ignore the mirror, or if you cannot ignore it, cover it. Do not correct your movements; do not even allow yourself to make a mental image of your movements. Do not compare of evaluate — stop judging. The goal of this dance is not art. The goal is personal freedom.
Whether you are nineteen or ninety, whether you weigh one hundred or three hundred pounds, whether you move with ease or difficulty, whether your joints are supple or stiff — no matter. Dance.
This dance is not for anyone’s eyes, not even your own.
You are dancing from within, dancing only your feelings, especially your repressed feelings. You are dancing what you cannot tell your mother or father, your husband, lover or friend, what you cannot tell your minister, priest or psychoanalyst, what you cannot tell yourself.
When you are throwing off your clothes, think and feel that you are throwing off all the ideas, feelings, compulsions, embarrassments, fears and shames that have been superimposed upon you. Some of these ideas and restraints are necessary and useful some of the time, but not all of them, and not all of the time. For this dance, throw off everything that has been superimposed upon your real self.
Be whatever you are.
BE — naked and alone.
With the first article of clothing throw off your social status. You may like your status, you may enjoy your social role — no matter. Throw them off.
With the next article of clothing, throw off the blindly accepted conventions of behavior; they may serve you well enough in public. But now, as you get ready to dance, throw them off.
With the third article of clothing, throw off your personal mask, the image of yourself that you present to others. Whatever it is, whether it is an heroic cover for desperation, whether it hides tenderness with a scowl, anxiety with laughter, loneliness with aloofness, resentment with humility — throw it off.
When you come to the last article of clothing, throw off with it the fear, ignorance and shame that have been imposed upon you by those who lack understanding and respect for sex and love. Throw off that last bit of clothing and that restraint before you begin your dance.
If it is loneliness you feel, let all your body feel it. If it is rage or hostility or fear, feel it with every cell. Through your naked dance, you expel all the unwanted, painful feelings. If these feeling become people and faces and colors, look at them. If they haunt you, dance them away. Dance them out, out of you. … Dance. Let the music and your feeling and your body be one. Dance what you feel. BE what you feel. This is your dance. IF you feel like singing—sing. If you feel like shrieking or chanting or wailing, then shriek or chant or wail. This is your dance—your creation—your liberation.
Remember, this was written in 1963. When I first read this, it reminded me of a performance I had seen in the presence of another Laura, my friend and storytelling teacher, Laura Simms. One year at one of her amazing one week storytelling retreats one of our fearless companions performed the Descent of Inanna. As he told the story he danced it. And in this story, as she enters the dark realms of the Underworld, as she passes through each gate she must remove an article of clothing, until she arrives naked in the world her sister rules. I cannot think of a more mythically resonant ritual, and a more terrifyingly liberating "recipe." You may dance all night at a club, taking any drug you like, and you will never enter these realms and return whole and hale. No. Dance naked and find your self.
Andrew Ramer is not as widely known in the queer world as he deserves to be. His book "Two Flutes Playing" is an early classic of queer spirituality gives voice to the inner truths many gay men experience
but have never had language for. And like many endeavors that give new language to experience, it is often a language of myth and metaphor. In his spiritual view of gaydar, he explains the phenomenon as a vibrational tuning that allows queer men to find each other.
When I first met Andrew I didn't know anything about this book — or the book he co-wrote that was a "new age" best seller in the 90s. We found each other at a seminar in upstate New York being taught by Drs. Gay & Kathlyn Hendricks in Body Oriented Psychotherapy and Conscious Relationship. We were the two queer jews in the room, so we shared a particular point of view of the proceedings (and while that sounds like we were judgmental it is more a statement of the outsider p.o.v. that jews bring to almost every situation we find ourselves in). I had introduced myself to the group as a red-headed, left-handed queer Jewish Buddhist from New York. Andrew spoke of himself as a Judeo-Pagan — and if I thought being a Jubu was a radical thing, Andrew blew me away with his boundary crossing transgressive approach to experiencing the divine.
As I began my journey into the world of traditional Jewish storytelling, Andrew in his traditional way wrote some very unusual stories about dybbuks, angels and rabbis. When he shared some of them with me I began to add them to my performance repertory. To this day I don't understand why his collection, "Rivkah's Sewing Machine," has never found a publisher.
Andrew was one of the co-founders of the Gay Spirit Visions conference that takes place yearly in North Carolina, and has been a key speaker there almost every year for the last 18 years. If you can imagine a conference that has the flavor of the radical faeries, with somewhat more organization, that's GSV. I've enjoyed every time I've gone and I would never have found it if I hadn't known Andrew. I'll never forget the year he taught this group of mostly lapsed Southern Baptists who have gone pagan about the Talmudic story of the Oven of Achne. He is someone who manages to hold together what appears to be an extraordinary range of contradictions in a living Zen koan.
Those Hendricks' seminars were in the mid 90s, but we've kept in touch. Andrew's writing was one of the inspirations for my creating the Stonewall Seder, and some of his writing appeared in the first version of this liturgy in 1996. Ten years later, when he reworked that liturgy for use at Congregation Sh'ar Zahav in San Francisco with Joss Eldredge, which in turn influenced the latest version of the liturgy used at Congregation B'nai Jeshurun this year.
Andrew writes a column, "Praxis," for the gay men's spirituality journal, "White Crane." And he is about to publish "Queering the Text: Biblical, Medieval, and Modern Jewish Stories."
Of course there is a reason Andrew isn't as well known as I believe he ought to be. His activism is inner activism, a transgressive search for the divine everywhere. That's too much of a challenge for most of us. And that challenge he puts before us is one reason he's one of my queer jubu heroes (though he'd never call himself a buddhist!).
Earlier this week I mentioned the University of Wisconsin students who were in NYC at the Stonewall and the LGBT Center studying gay american history. Well, they were also in Philadelphia, where one of the heroes of my youth, Mark Segal, showed them the first government sponsored historic marker honoring LGBT history, at the site of the first homosexual rights demonstration in Philadelphia on July 4th, 1965. You can actually see these students enacting a recreation of this march, with Mark giving them historic background, on YouTube.
I first met Mark at an anti-war protest (Viet Nam era) in 1970, where he was carrying a banner for Gay Youth. I took one look at him and his cadre of gay youthies and said, "Where have you been all my life?" Next year that time I was president of the group, succeeding Mark who had gone on to other adventures, most notably publishing Philadephia Gay News today. But not before he stopped by CBS News in the 1970s to interrupt a broadcast of Walter Cronkite delivering the evening news and chaining himself to the anchor desk to protest the silence on the issue of lgbt rights in the media. This is a gutsy man I have always admired.
Back in the '70s there was a gay men's poetry journal called Mouth Of The Dragon. It published young unknowns and Frank O'Hara. It introduced me to incantatory ruminations of Joe Brainard and to the quietly sexy poetry of Ian Young. Among the writers I discovered in those pages was Perry Brass. It was odd I hadn't actually met him since I'd been at GLF meetings at Alternate U., but then those meetings were often so chaotic (and at 18 years of age, I wasn't interested in speaking to anyone over the age
of 21) that the memory is still a blur of arguments about consciousness-raising groups and whether the men should all shave their beards in solidarity with the women (who obviously didn't have beards). All this is a roundabout way of saying that I finally met Perry at a party at the LGBT Center a few weeks back to honor Mark Thompson for his photo exhibit on Queer Spiritual Leaders (Men's division). I was happy to meet two men whose work has guided me in my spiritual growth as a gay man (Perry and Mark together on the right).
And then, a week later, Perry was back at the Center, along with a group of other writers, all there to
read their contributions to an anthology called Identity Envy. It was an intense evening, with a most affecting reading by Rosebud Ben-Ami, a story called Mishmumken: For Those Who Cannot Choose. This was the story of a lesbian relationship between an Israeli-American Jew and a Palestinian-Israeli Christian. There was a wild story by an
exciting young writer named JDGuilford about the meaning of dreadlocks to black men, and what happens when a gay black man takes on this style so filled with sexual-political meaning. And then there was Perry, reading his memories of growing up Jewish in the South with the fantasy of being a blond Christian girl (this reminded me of Katherine Kurs' memoir in Searching for Your Soul: Writers of Many Faiths Share Their Personal Stories of Spiritual Discovery, in which she recounts growing up a Jewish girl who wants to become a nun and dressed her dolls as nuns).
Yes, Identity Envy is about how we all harbor the desire not only for the Other, but often the desire to be the Other. It's a rich collection well worth reading. As is Searching For Your Soul, which I will have to write about at length another time.
One reason I was particularly happy to meet Perry and Mark at the party those weeks back is that the three of us can now be found under one cover. We three all have work published in another anthology, Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit In Storytelling, which has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award (ceremony is next Thursday and the burning question of the moment is, should I go to the awards or go to the opening night film at the NewFestival? I have tickets to both! WIll words seduce me,or will it be the image on the screen?) I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to be in print besides these men I so admire — and in fact, you'll also find in Charmed Lives stories by Jay Michaelson and Andrew Ramer, two queer jubu heroes of mine.
But back to Perry, who has been quite busy since his poems appeared in that little zine 30 plus years ago. He has quite a literary oeuvre, and I urge you to check it out. Not to mention his seduction advice.
In the realm of Malkhut, there is only one kind of compassion — it is fully informed by the energies of all sefirot above, and it is fully manifested in the world. In other words, it is Compassion in Action. Which just happens to be the title of a book by one of my Queer Jubu Heroes, Baba Ram Dass (co-written with Mirabai Bush).
So for this day of Compassion in Action, some quotes from Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush on the subject:
Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of
the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings.
When our hearts open, when we know that we are in
fact the world, when we experience the pain of others in our own blood
and muscle, we are feeling compassion.
Whether our compassionate action is done alone or
in a group, inner exploration remains the complement to external action,
and, with time and patience, it can lead to clearer awareness, action and
more integrity, and a freer flow of the heart's breath.
By acting compassionately, by helping to restore justice and to encourage peace, we are acknowledging that we are all part of one
another.
Choose your path of action, have it come from a place of love. And start small, but do it consistently. Just like this practice of counting the Omer.
And by the way, for those of you who haven't seen the photography exhibit on Queer Spirit at the LGBT Center, there is a portrait of the good Dr. Richard Alpert, aka Ram
Dass, on the wall in the good company of other great men of spirit. If you don't know his story, it's a wild one, starting at Harvard with Timothy Leary and the search for transcendence through psychedelics. But as Leary lost himself in drugs, Alpert left him behind to continue his search for transcendence in India, where he met the spiritual teacher who gave him the path that has enabled him to experience the transcendence he sought earlier though unskillful means, this time, grounded in the reality of everyday experience. Since then he has devoted his life to teaching and service. A few years ago he suffered a debilitating stroke, but has made learning to live with and recover from its effects part of his practice, thus becoming an example for all who suffer and struggle with illness.
I must admit to being somewhat resentful for years that Ram Dass wasn't publicly out. And when he did come out, it wasn't quite the statement I wanted, though I had to agree with the spiritual message he was delivering. But that's my issue, my attachment to my views. There is no question that he is a great teacher. Go see his portrait, along with the others, while you can, the exhibit is up through this weekend. And take action — be an inner activist and do your work in the world.
