Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

In Memory of Ed Eisenberg: Activist, Artist, Member of Gay Youth in the 70s

Today is the 10th anniversary of the death of the artist/activist Edward Eisenberg. He was not only a member of Gay Youth in the 1970s, but also the Gay Activists Alliance.

He went on to become a  core member of the artist's collective, REPOhistory,  a multi-ethnic group of visual and performance artists, writers, filmmakers, and historians, founded in New York City in 1989. The group took its name from the concept of "repossessing history." Its purpose was to retrieve, relocate and document absent historical narratives at specific sites in New York City, through public installations, performances, educational activities, printed matter and other visual media. REPOhistory sought to question how history is constructed and insert the stories of peoples and events which have been omitted. Their work addressed historical issues of colonialism, race, gender, and class in a context relevant to current histories.

REPOhistory operated as an artist/scholar cooperative through 6 major public projects and many smaller events. Believing the arts essential to shaping a collective cultural identity and the relationship between art, culture and society to be confused, it instigated a questioning of the culture of the 1980s and the early 1990s.

One of Ed's projects was called Groundworks — a city-wide street-stencil project protesting nuclear battleships on Staten Island that noted in each street-stencil the exact distance from these nuclear warships. He was also involved in art projects the documented and protested the ongoing gentrification of the Lower East Side.

When Ed first came to Gay Youth he was rather reserved and shy. A nice Jewish boy who eventually became very politically involved. He grew a beard of rabbinic proportion, and tied his long hair back in a flowing pony tail. He leafleted colleges and high schools with GY and always spoke to the need for a broader awareness of issues beyond the lgbt community. He was also deadpan funny. He was one of the members who was at our reunion in 1994, one of the few who was still politically active.

As I light a yahrtzeit candle in his memory, I will remember to keep his fire alive.

Larry Craig is not gay

That's what he says. And I have to agree with him. You see, when I came out, the word gay had a particular meaning that was distinct from the word homosexual.

In the 60s, gay activists used the word gay to speak of something beyond a sex act to mean a way of living one's life, which included being out and proud. If one is out and proud, then you're gay. If you're closeted and engaged in same sex activity, you are having homosexual sex, but you aren't gay. So, Ted Haggard isn't gay. Larry Craig isn't gay. Someday they may be, but right now they are men suffering in a closet. And men who live in a closet always have the narrowest views, they are threatened by gay people. Which is why these men and for that matter people like Roy Cohn, always attacked gay rights.

Gay does indeed refer to a lifestyle. It is an expression of recognition that who and how we love when celebrated openly colors our view of the world. It is not at all assimilationist, rather it celebrates the ways in which we are different apart from the mere movement of body parts.

Of course, the word and it's use has evolved since the 60s. I write this to make a point, and to be clear that as a gay man, I want nothing to do with the Larry Craigs of the world. I may have compassion for his suffering - but when he projects his suffering by persecuting us he must be both vigorously opposed and exposed. And for the way he has made others suffer because of his own suffering, he should pay a price. In fact, he is paying a price — I believe the phrase we got from Shakespeare is that he is hoist on his own petard.

You can almost always be certain that those who oppose us so intensely are fighting an inner battle with their own shadow selves by projecting it out on the world. And it is why, as JMG noted in quoting a story on CNN where an airport cop is interviewed:   

"You would think that it would be a gay issue but overwhelmingly, more and more, we're seeing that these are people with families." The niggling implication that gay men don't have families aside, it's good to see him frame this as an issue of closeted "straight" men.

And here the distinction is made, even if it wasn't conscious. It's not a gay issue because gay men, by this old definition, don't do this. Obviously, there are gay men who do this — and some of them are there acting out old shame issues compulsively. We are a wounded tribe in many ways.

One serious (and very funny) exploration of the toilet sex phenomenon is a Canadian film called Urinal. in it, a number of deceased artists and writers, including Frida Kahlo, Sergei Eisenstein, Yukio Mishima and Langston Hughes materialize and live in a deserted church in Toronto, where they must report on the police sting actions in local public toilets. It's a wild film, both filled with laughs and serious questions. I saw this at the NewFest in NYC in 1989 I think.

Then there is the great Chinese film East Palace, West Palace, where a young Chinese man is arrested by an attractive policeman in a sting in a Beijing public toilet and interrogated all night. This film managed to make it past the censors in China who did not recognize it for what it was: a meditation on what it means to live in a totalitarian state, and the strange erotic attraction of power differences.

I suspect Larry Craig would do well to watch both of these films. He would learn more about himself than he clearly wants to admit.

Music I Can Read

I remember studying music theory with my old piano teacher Mr. Gates back in Brooklyn in the early 60s. I practiced scales. I played simplified classical pieces. The Marines Hymn. Yes, Mr. Gates was rather conservative. He didn't like it if when he asked, "How is your mother?" I would reply, "She..." He felt that I should say "Mother is fine, thank you." So I don't think he would approve of this piece of music, written by the Fluxus artist, Dick Higgins, called Ten Ways of Looking At A Bird.

And while I haven't sat at a piano since the mid-90s this is a piece I would love to play.

What, if any, relation this has to the eerie Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird, I can't imagine. But the similarity of names calls forth this resonance. So I invite anyone who might have an idea what relationship there might be, to write about it below.

Confusing Hair Styles: The dread-mullet

Okay, you can make any jokes you want about the dreaded mullet. It's a hair style that is much maligned and has come to stand for a class of people who are clueless about fashion. Although it might be more accurate to say that these men have their own feelings about fashion and the hell with what anyone else thinks. Which I can't disagree with since I am not a big fan of fashion fascism. And clearly beauty is in the eye of the beholder...

But what happens when someone can't decide between dreadlocks and a mullet? Letz start by considering the cultural associations with these various hair styles.

In its modern incarnation, dreadlocks istarted as a political statement made by Jamaicans of African descent who practiced the Rastafari religion. It was, among other things, connect with the Nazirite vow of the Hebrew Bible (Samson was a Nazir, which is why his hair was never cut). The politics of dreads have  alternately been connected to pan-Africanism, anti-colonialism and a repudiation of all Western culture. And of course, like all such protests, it has been appropriated by young Westerners throughout Europe and the U.S., first in political solidarity, and ultimately as a fashion statement devoid of any meaning (except that with its spread, since it changes standards of beauty, thus having some small effect of bridging a gap, but not much more than say, the appropriation of R&B by white musicians did in changing race relations in the U.S., which is not much at all).

Then there is the mullet. First made popular by David Bowie in the 70s, the style quickly went from cool to very uncool. By the early 90s it was popular to bash the hairstyle and there are any number of books and songs that make fun of this simple extra length of hair at the nape of the neck. For whatever reason, the mullet went from Glam rock and Bowie to become associated with clueless southern white boys.

So there we have two groups who most likely would not enjoy each others company. Two groups that are perhaps only united by homophobia.

I can't speak for the politics or ideas held by the young man whose picture I captures from a cab as I left the Metropolitan Museum today, since that's as close as I got to him. What I can say is that the mix and appropriation of cultural symbols without awareness or care for their original meaning seems to characterize the consumerist values we put on everything.

The Barnaby Goodge Incident

My friend Louis Rispoli sent me this reminiscence of a Gay Pride March the other day, and after reading it I  felt compelled to share it here:

When I had just come back to New York from Chapel Hill I immediately got involved in gay politics and started going to gay rights rallies and meetings and the like.  But I did not perceive myself to be someone who carried a sign.  I went to the marches and marched alongside others carrying signs, but never carried one myself. 

Then in 1977, when Anita Bryant helped topple the Dade County gay rights ordinance, there was an increase of energy in the community as it prepared for the annual march. Everybody felt it.  I decided I would make a sign.  I thought and thought and thought.  I finally came up with a design:  against a background of painted bricks I made a perfect Punnett's Square where the top headings were M and F and the side headings were also were M and F and the combinations therefore were MM, MF, MF, and FF.  Underneath that I wrote: "It's so simple."  Which I thought was all too elegant.  And I spent the night painting it and glueing it to a cardboard pole.  And was so proud of myself.  On Gay Pride Day, I emerged from my building with my sign held high.  But didn't get far.

On the steps, I encountered a young actor activist I knew, with the improbable name of Barnaby Goodge.  He looked at my sign, flew into an incredible rage, yanked it from my hands, tore it to shreds, threw it on the floor, and stomped and kicked at it as if it were an alien that had to be smashed to smithereens, screaming and shouting at me all the while.  I mean foam from the mouth.

It took a moment or two for me to realize what had happened--I had been paralyzed with astonishment from the sheer brutality of the attack, physical and verbal.  And that's when I replayed the tape of his rant in my head, and heard him saying "I hate you fucking intellectuals.  So fucking smart with your sign.  Who the fuck is going to care about that .  Nobody. Except maybe a few more of your schoolboy buddies.  Get the fuck out of my sight.  Next time, carry a sign that says 'Gas Anita.'  That means something."  And he stomped off. 

After a few days--my feelings deeply hurt besides my beautiful hand-painted sign ruined and never seen--I decided he was absolutely right. I WAS too interested in being perceived clever.  It's what I had been taught to want my whole life from well-intentioned people who lived their lives in books and through books.  But activism--not the armchair or discursive sort but the real sort-- involves provoking change by strong actions.  (I would argue good art does too.)  In the end, as in all things, I saw the Barnaby
Goodge incident as a lesson I needed to know. 

In my life and in my art--all the poems I've written in all the years since I was a kid--I attempt to say something I mean or feel strongly.   I don't' fake organisms or feign transports (Virgil Thomson's criticism of Leonard Bernstein as a conductor).

All the same, I'm still beset even at this late stage in my life by too deep an admiration for stylistic flourish or any elegance, but at least I try use these to create some effect achieved through directness which can't be achieved without it.  An imperative compellingness to exist.  I believe in art that is so informed, and when I'm feeling I need to be opinionated, disdain art that is not.  I especially disdain empty intellectualism divorced from lived life.  A gilded fake is still just a fake.  And I want to reserve my admiration for the real thing.  In all so literal a way.

I took the photo above that very year in front of the New York Public Library at 40th street and 5th Avenue as I marched by in the pride parade. I think that man's message was better than Goodge's "Gas Anita," but I can't disagree with the point of the story.

And as for the name Barnaby Goodge, as near as I can tell it was the name of a 16th Century English scholar. So that actor who took that obscure name for memorability at casting calls actually was doing the same thing he accused Lou of doing. So 30 years later, take that B. Goodge! 

Queer Jubu Heroes: Andrew Ramer

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!).

"I've often thought that I would like...

...to be the saddle of a bike."

This little couplet is attributed to the great 20th Century queer poet W.H. Auden.

It sprang to my mind when I came across this old print ad in an issue of Life Magazine from 1952, since it seemed to this, uh, jaundiced eye, that the visual seemed to capture some time warp cruising.

Yes: "other times, other tastes" indeed.

I just love the copy here: "...I ought to know, it's Blatz, Blatz, Blatz, wherever you go."

What an infelicitous name for a product. Sounds more like an onomatopoetic name for a laxative. Who knows, that might have been a side effect of this product.

I shouldn't poke fun. This product actually still exists, and has its own fan website. I've just never been a beer drinker of any sort. I just find myself in agreement with Auden's sentiments — until I think of the opening scene of John Waters' Desperate Living where Mink Stole's husband is smothered under the enormous butt of their housekeeper.

No. I suppose the lines of Auden that most inspire me, especially since this post goes up as I am taking the sea air in Cherry Grove, are from another poem attributed to him: A Day for a Lay. And whether he wrote it or not, it sure is a fun read.

Elul

The first day of Elul, the month before Rosh HaShana, was yesterday. Traditionally at shacharit services the ram's horn is sounded during this period. It's the spiritual alarm clock meant to wake us up.

And alarm is the operative word. Certainly I struggle on a daily basis with waking up to the reality of the divine in every moment. And waking up from the deadness of routine. For when I'm living cut off from this awareness, when I am moving through life reacting rather than responding, there is real cause for alarm. It's cause for alarm all over the world in fact, since it seems so many of our leaders react rather than respond.

That said, I hold with the teaching of Krishnamurti here: the only revolution starts within. The only way we can effect tikkun olam (obviously not his words for it) is if we are doing the inner work required. This is what made Ghandi the powerful leader that he was. It's what made M.L.King the powerful leader he was. Change yourself and you change the world. I try to remind myself of this, a live it every day.

And like a good Buddhist who knows that compassion is essential, I am very forgiving when I screw up, which I also do on a daily basis.

From Scissorhands to Razorhands: Depp in Sweeney Todd

Once, many years ago I heard someone spoken of as scary sexy.

It's never how I thought of the part of Sweeney Todd, despite the number of productions I've seen in varous cities around the world.

Of course, like all of us, I'd heard that Mr. D. was going to play the part in the movie. Now it's not for lack of imagination, but given that I'd never seen ST as an object of desire it didn't occur to me that when J.D. took on the role that his own smoldering sensuality would be imparted to the part.

And then I saw this poster.

OMG. And duh.

That said, the film version of A Little Night Music, despite an all star cast, was a complete disaster. So I am nervous.

And lets be clear — ST is not exactly mainstream entertainment. Or for that matter music that's pleasant. The monotonous melody drills into your skull like Steve Martin's sadistic dentist in Little Shop of Horrors.

But somehow, seeing this poster, and the photo below, I am excited. And I don't mean aroused. I mean eager and thrilled at how this translation to film may really work in ways that a Broadway musical hasn't seen in years.

Don't talk to me about Hairspray, It's fun and wonderful and I love it, but it is made for the screen since it is completely self aware and filled with winks — ST should have none of this if it is to work. In fact, it can show the cesspool that was VIctorian London in ways we've never seen on film:

"There's a hole in the world like a great black pit
And it's filled with people who are filled with shit
And the vermin of the world inhabit it..." 

Just the perfect film for the holidays, eh? Works for me. Thanks to Tom and Steven for sending this on.

Rage against the dying of the light

This last weekend, for the first time since May the sun went down before 8pm. The summer is now truly waning. The Manhattan nights I love so much, when it is still light till late and one can wander through the village and enjoy the sunset from the pier, or uptown from Riverside Park...soon enough this will be hard to do. Hell, it was impossible to do tonight since I worked until after 8pm.

Now I work in advertising, and that means deadlines, which means often working late. But when summer comes I think it is absolutely criminal to have to work past sundown.

One of the reasons I loved the times I've visited Copenhagen in summer is the light lasting so late...I rather find myself disagreeing with Mr. Sondheim. No, perpetual sunset is not an unsettling thing. I'll go with Dylan Thomas on this one. A rare win in this match.