On Ritual Authenticity

The second instalment in a manifesto. My posts to Anchorhold have always had a utopian slant. I've always shared thoughts here about a longed-for social formation: one where our queer spiritual lives can find expression and support in conditions of full visibility and community. 

Content warning: abstract, theoretical language and some long sentences. 

2. The Perils of "Parashamanism"

Photo by Andrew Graham

As gay/bi/+ men, we have to figure out how to adopt best ritual practices that truly support us. We need to take seriously our liminal ("not in and not out") experience of the world as a touchstone for what we create. 

There's a sort of “classic consensus,” about ritual authenticity. Formulated by scholars like Nathan Mitchell and Mary Douglas, it presupposes that you need strong social consensus and unified group identity for ritual to work well. But maybe models like that come already  wired into heterosexist assumptions that won't serve us well. 

Consider a few examples of powerful, effective gay ritual that came out of the ghetto culture of the 1970s and 1980s: the processions following the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978; the creation and repeated display of the NAMES Project memorial quilt beginning in the late 1980's; practices included in many AIDS funerals, in the devastating period of the disease’s impact on the gay community prior to the development of “cocktail” treatments and the transformation of HIV into a more manageable medical condition. 

The AIDS Memorial Quilt displayed on the White House ellipse, 1989, by Jeff Tinsley. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 11-009, Image No. 89-20259.

I'm not trying to romanticize these examples. Doing so could suggest that medical apocalypse and social stigmatization of the dying were ideal conditions for queer ritual authenticity. But paradoxcially, we come up with our strongest ritual practices when we're in touch with our marginal "not like everybody else" position in the world. 

As gay/bi/+ men, we move constantly in and out of that marginal space. It's something we celebrate as an aspect of our ordinary experience--and yet at times something we try to elude. We come together provisionally and temporarily because of our shared marginalization as men who love men. One of the wondrous things about queer men's community is its the potential to bring us together across lines of class, ethnicity, and gender expression. (Walt Whitman knew this over 150 years ago; Edward Carpenter knew this. E.M. Forster knew this.)  But then most of us move partially and intermittently out of queer community, in order to conform to the requirements of a larger society where we often need (or choose) to make our way, as best we can.

Mainstream academic theories of ritual practice, in short, don't fit very well with aspects of authentic queer ritual life.

Shiva at Summer Camp: A Fire Altar at Easton Mountain

For decades we've accessed alternative structures to explore, celebrate, and cultivate our spiritual lives. They include the Radical Faerie movement, gay and gay-friendly retreat facilities, and regional organizations like Gay Spirit Visions, centered in the American Southeast, or the Billies in northern California. Those structures nurture individual growth and afford precious nodes of community. 

The birth of the Radical Faeries, 1979

At the same time, they provide mostly intermittent, and often tenuous, support. Despite them, we still need deeper soil for a more richly layered experience of ritual. Ritual practice in such contexts risks the limitations of what scholar Ronald Grimes dubbed “parashamanism.” He delivers a pretty brutal critque that often comes too close for comfort to the circumstances of our efforts as queer men to remake ritual. Grimes sketches a typical profile of the parashaman: a highly educated, leftist, post-Christian or post-Jewish product of the middle class, often economically marginalized, suspicious of the labels of traditional religion, and preoccupied in  midlife with the existential “themes of death, birth, violence, and sexuality.” 

Parashamanism appropriates multiple traditions without much regard for specifics of history. It focuses on ritual and myth over conceptual content, which it often just ignores. It romanticizes the appeal of "primitive" societies, but glosses over the specfiics of such cultures, including the violence and physical risk often associated with those societies’ rites of passage, healing, and insight. The parashaman is “intellectually anti-intellectual.” His eclectic appropriation of multiple traditions can show colonizing disregard for the integrity and cohesion of the cultures his practices draw from.

More than a little of what Grimes describes recalls memories of queer men's spiritual gatherings--for instance, when indigenous ritual styles and practices are appropriated in almost entirely non-Native contexts, sometimes without even an acknowledgement of the borrowing. I remember vividly being at a large gay men's gathering where the main assembly hall was adorned with symbols of multiple spiritual traditions--without real evidence of deeper engagement. The one notable absence being Christianity, though it informed the backgrounds of most men present. The devanagiri monogram of Hinduism's sacred syllable Aum was inadvertently mounted upside-down. That stuck with me as a telling index of what can go wrong with cafeteria-style spirituality.

New Age workshop culture is an easy target for Grimes's critique. Such gatherings tend to promise peak experiences for the sake of the "high" itself. Workshops aren't set up to integrate an individual’s life into a community. Instead, they're designed to enhance a participant's individual identity, side by side with others' individual identities. Workshop experiences emphasize the individual’s unique characteristics or destiny, and his right to personal fulfilment. Some gatherings are highly structured throughout, and flooded with intense experiences. Others offer a cafeteria of optional, modular experiences. All this fits easily into a  capitalist model that commodifies experience and spiritual value.

The high of finding community in workshop culture is real. It can be positive and life-changing. But it's invariably temporary, and the return to ordinary life easily leaches away the experience's ongoing resonance. Without continued supports for integration, the memory of a moment of peak intensity isn't easily integrated into the individual's return to ordinary. The phenomenon of the "workshop junkie" is real: the repetition-compulsion of "chasing the dragon," absent communal supports for a lasting, heightened integration of the spiritual self.

And yet, at the same time, despite all these pitfalls of parashamanism, Grimes also argues for the cultural authenticity of grass-roots experiments and improvisation in contexts of cultural and social flux--what he calls “emerging ritual.” Which begs the question: what distinction is he making? And what distinction can we make? That seems to me worth asking, because Grimes's positive idea of emerging ritual aligns with important aspects of queer men's culture: our love of parody; our ability both to take our lives seriously and at the same time to see the irony in them; our necessary talent for making things up as we go along. These are skills our tribe has long cultivated in order to sustain our emotional and spiritual lives. 

In other words, as we go on thinking about "emerging ritual," we'll see that it has a lot in common with the creativity and resilience of gay camp--with the skills we've developed to survive, and thrive, in our liminal, "not inside and not outside" space on the margins.

Devotional banners by Barrie Petterson

On Ritual Authenticity

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55 Minutes of Edging

 ...or the closest thing to it: the Kiev Christmas liturgy, gloriously sung by a choir of insanely hot Russian men. Long before the nightmare of the current war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kP0FA4IhWE

On a Path with Little Light

A few candles protected from the wind by IKEA lanterns, once someone manages to get the butane lighter to function.  Ten people doing our best to find the way in darkness. The glare of lights from an oversize indoor shopping mall just yards away. A ring of tents around us sheltering underhoused people on a damp December evening.

As always, the labyrinth is a teacher, with a new lesson every time. An ancient spiritual technology, far older than Christianity, but long adapted to Christian meditative use, as at Chartres Cathedral, where the pattern was laid into the pavement of the church centuries ago--and then rediscovered late in the last century after being long ignored.

You enter by the only opening available. You follow a single path in blind trust that it will take you to the center, and then back out again. You can't get lost. But you do need to pay attention.

Each time, it's different. You walk alone. Or you walk with a group. You walk with strangers and learn to pass one another with a silent gesture of acknowledgement. You walk alongside someone on a parallel course, until suddenly the turn in their stretch of the path transports them from your side far across the circle. You walk just adjacent to the center, and then the path winds you back out for another five or six turns before you finally arrive at the heart of things.

You walk on a cold night in December, in a year when it's hard to have faith that the arc of history is bending toward justice, along with a few others who also long for the coming of justice and peace and the deliverance of Creation. What you do with your feet, you do with your soul. 

You listen to a siren on a nearby street. You pray for the distraught young woman who's shouting to everyone else in the encampment that she wants back what's gone missing from her tent. You can barely make out the pattern in the pavement. Sometimes you have doubts whether you've missed the turn. And then there it is, the place where you're meant to double back 180 degrees.

You reach the center, as chance would have it, just as the bell at the nearby church tolls six o'clock. The ten of you sing a Taize chant:  "The kingdom of God is justice and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. Come, Lord, and open in us the gates of your Kingdom." 

And then you retrace your steps, Wednesday night in the second week of Advent.  

A Queer Touch Across Time

Edward Carpenter and his lover George Merrill, ca. 1900

I've spent much of my life cruising the past--sifting through the ambiguous evidence that our kind was here long before any of us now living. Gaydar isn't just about what you pick up from the guy who's waiting next to you at the bus stop. It's about the diary that turns up in the personal effects of an uncle who lived decades earlier in Washington DC. The box of photographs from a small town in New Brunswick that a local man took of his lover in the 1920s. The unsent letter that somehow survived when the rest of the writer's correspondence was burnt.

As gay and bi men, we're used to looking for the evidence of one another's existence in subtle hints at the edge of things. Our greater visibility over the last generation or two hasn't really changed that. If we enjoy middle-class privilege in a tolerant bubble, we can more easily imagine that we don't still live our lives in the margins. But take your gay visibility 50 miles into the hinterlands, and find out whether you still feel safe. Take it to the Florida panhandle, or to the middle of Kansas. Or closer to home, to the wrong neighbourhood in your own city;  into the wrong bar; into the sanctuary of the wrong church. Try being an out man of colour in many communities of origin. And nearly anywhere, especially now, try being visibly trans.

So much has changed over the last fifty years; yet in some ways, in some places, very little. The freedoms we've won are now once again at risk, as the forces of Christian nationalism and social reaction stand ready to be unleashed by the deceptive charlatan who will be sworn in as President of the United States in less than two months.

On that upbeat note: generation after generation, we've survived and found each other--and found our ancestors-of-choice--by being, necessarily, amateur archivists, scanning for the traces that tell us, as gay photographer Robert Giard put it in his preface to Particular Voices, "These people were here; like me, they lived and breathed." Those we encounter in such traces reply, "We were here; we existed. This is how we were." 

Assotto Saint. Portrait by Robert Giard, 1987

The phrase "queer touch across time" belongs to literary scholar and queer theorist Carolyn Dinshaw. I've been thinking about her formulation a lot this week. In connection with a diary like the one I mentioned above, published as Jeb and Dash: A Diary of Gay Life 1918-1945, edited by Ina Russell. 

In connection with the cache of photos that inspired the volume Len and Cub: A Queer History, by Meredith Batt and Dusty Green.

In connection especially with a wonderful two-part BBC television presentation from 2017, but which I only watched this week, Man in an Orange Shirt, whose plot is too complex to summarize here, but which turns entirely on the way that the material traces of an obscured past become the means of reconciliation, healing, and liberation for its characters. 

We have a right to a past we can live with--a past that makes sense of our present. We have a right to search out the queer ancestors who impart to our own lives the richness and depth that comes of knowing we have a history. And we must claim it for ourselves, cobbling it together from the fragments that survive, and energized by our desire.