If Memory Serves

I’ve just finished reading a recently published, forcefully critical look at the progress of queer theory: If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past (Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed, University of Minnesota Press, 2012). It questions the ways that some very influential work in the field has deemphasized history and memory in our understanding of gay culture. I won’t here get into an elaborate summary of its academic arguments.

But the key point of the book has really gotten under my skin: the authors’ claim that we’ve developed collective amnesia about the AIDS crisis, a post-traumatic refusal to remember. We not only fail to remember the crisis. We’ve forgotten along with the crisis the strength of the culture that an LGBTQ coalition built to respond to it. And even more profoundly, we’ve repudiated the sexual revolution that built post-Stonewall gay culture in the first place. But the authors aren’t just lamenting the loss of a past that’s over and done with. More importantly, in forgetting the past, we’ve also cut ourselves off from precious resources for imagining and living toward a queer future. In our amnesiac flight from mourning, we’ve also fled what they call “the promise of the queer past.”

Maybe their argument hit me so deeply because I’m 56 and just spent three weeks in San Francisco, my first extended stay there since a hip replacement told me forcefully a couple of years ago that my life’s not the same as it used to be. If you need cheering up, this post isn’t for you. I’m going to begin with grief. And I claim the right of the drama queen to take you on a tour of my lieux de mémoire.

This trip to San Francisco, I stayed in an apartment a five-minute walk from the bed-and-breakfast I settled into in September 1986. I took my first walk along Castro Street in the company of a younger friend with whom I’d flown up the coast from San Diego. The street was thick with the likes of us.

Ten minutes’ walk in the other direction, somewhere south of Market along Duboce stands the building where I first met the gentle, intelligent, gifted man my young friend had just fallen in love with, six months later when he was newly moved to the city.

Back around the corner from Castro on 19th, in a house whose address I've also forgotten, is the apartment into which they later moved, where from visit to visit I witnessed, as in time-lapse photography, the progressive deterioration of my friend’s lover, diagnosed very soon after they'd found each other. T. would stay with him to the end; he took to kissing his beloved’s KS lesions as they lay together evenings on the couch. Meanwhile, he’d find sexual recreation at Blow Buddies, reassured that everything he indulged in there fell within current safety guidelines; and would subsequently sero-convert as a result of those safe(r) excursions, an exception to the harm-reduction rule.

Just north of Market, across Church Street from the Safeway, stands St. Francis Lutheran, which I wrote about earlier this month. I’ll quote these lines from that post: “I first walked into St. Francis in 2000…. As the Gospel book was carried in a very short procession into the middle of the congregation, everyone turned to face the reader… and then crowded from the pews into the central aisle, hands laid on shoulders in a web that knit the whole assembly into a single body with a living voice at its center. And I lost it.”

Inbound on Market Street, for a scant decade beginning in the mid-80’s, a black door opened onto a safe-sex space known simply by its address as the 1808 Club. It offered clear rules of engagement (lips above hips, and not even the appearance of penetration) that headed off the awkwardness of negotiating limits with prospective partners; ample lube and paper towels everywhere one turned; a series of spaces that flowed easily and invitingly into one another, allowing for cordial connections and cordial disengagements, but giving little opportunity to hive off into pairs or groups impervious to others as they passed by.

Camaraderie prevailed; and sometimes blossomed into something for which camaraderie is an inadequate label: a liminal state in which mutual desire and the gifting of pleasure offered something more--a time and space for meeting the Other, a recognition of the Other’s intrinsic and irreplaceable worth, an affirmation of the self in relation to that Other—an opening into a relation of I/Thou; a performed faith that the transcendent dwelt in one’s own flesh and in the flesh of those one touched. (Here too, as at St Francis Lutheran, at the best of times, an assembly was knit together into a single body with a living voice at its center. And I lost it.)

Maybe I'm just letting advancing age get the better of me, but it’s hard for me not to say, as I wander through these sites of memory, it’s so over. We wanted an army of lovers, and we’re preparing to settle for the right to marry, seduced by the very opposition that still vociferously contests that self-evidently domesticated and hardly revolutionary goal. We wanted an army of lovers, and we settled for the right to bear arms in service of a country whose foreign policy has successfully combined brutal imperialism with spectacular fecklessness. We wanted a world of playful, positive, joyful, healing sexuality, and instead we got ManHunt and Grinder. We wanted ecstasy, and instead we got Ecstasy.

What I feel now isn’t the grief of a man who spent ten years watching his friends and lovers die around him, and sometimes in his arms: for the most part, I inhabited the hinterlands of the health crisis, and if anything, I carry a half-suppressed guilt for the fact that I remained so insulated from the depths of raw personal loss. Instead, I feel grief for the world that those who died longed to build—mixed with guilt that I failed to risk more, when I had the chance, to build it with them.

They were aiming for a world, as Judith Butler puts in Undoing Gender, in which we’re undone by each other—and if not, as she goes on to ask, what’s the point? They sustained themselves on possibility, if we remember how partial and momentary that world's inbreaking remained—for, to paraphrase Butler once again, possibility isn’t a luxury, but as crucial as bread.

To move from abstracted and not very sexy language back to my places of memory, to be clearer about what I’m trying to work out here, these are a few moments of Grace: my friend Tom kissing the KS lesions of his dying beloved; the ashes of several dozen men who (whatever else one might or might not know of them) had probably lived lives to enrage the religious right, lovingly and reverently placed below inscribed paving stones in the garden of a small Lutheran church; the whimpering gratitude of a man surrounded by a knot of more or less anonymous jackoff enthusiasts. They’re moments of Grace not because they speak to some essential core of human nature, or somehow express a deep truth of what human sexuality is intended to be, but because they were a response to emergent possibility as we chose to be undone and remade in relation to one another.

If you share any part of this grief for your own fragments of the queer past, we share the recognition that we’ve lost a web of connections. Butler would also remind us that to grieve is to acknowledge that we’ve been touched, and in the experience of being touched been transformed and thrown off center by the presence of the other.

I long now for that decenteredness: for the sense that, whatever our lives meant, the promise they held out had to do with what they meant and might come to mean together--that we were, indeed, in Butler’s sense, undone by one another, thrown off center, left not the same and not complete within ourselves. I long for the crowding together of the whole congregation into a single body—whether to hear the Gospel in the midst of Mass, or to hear the equally good news of the sanctity of flesh proclaimed by half a dozen men sheltering a comrade through his experience of ecstasy. The memory of T.’s brave, edgy experimentation--supporting his lover through terminal illness and at the same time taking affirmative responsibility for the cultivation of his erotic self--seems a fragment of a world of vanished possibility, lost as we’ve rushed to reassure that most tyrannical of addressees, the Undecided Moderate, that we want nothing more and nothing other than what s/he would want—marriage, military service, ordination—if s/he hadn’t had it all the time.

And yet—I don’t view grief for that world as a negative experience. I wouldn’t anaesthetize myself if I could. Memory goes hand in hand with desire, and desire points not just toward the past, but (as Castiglia and Reed point out) toward a future we can only partly imagine. What I’m asking myself now, more than anything else, is, how do I, how do we, lay claim to a future that’s worthy of the brave, loopy, risk-embracing past, the past that includes Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter, includes Magnus Hirschfeld and Allen Ginsberg and James Baldwin and Harry Hay and Thom Gunn and Keith Haring and Michael Callen?

Dream It. Believe It.

This just in from Occupy UC-Davis. Thank God for the young.

Those People at That Church

Just north of Market Street, and across Church Street from probably the cruisiest supermarket in San Francisco—recall that it was in the Church and Market Safeway that Mary Ann Singleton tried to pick up Michael Tolliver at the beginning of Tales of the City—stands an unassuming little brick gothic church, built by Danish Lutherans in 1906. As the Castro came to be the Castro, the congregation could hardly fail to see that the neighborhood around them was changing. But more importantly, and perhaps more surprisingly, its pastor and members recognized that life meant embracing change, and they chose life, opening their doors to the burgeoning LGBT community that flourished around them, as to the marginalized and often homeless population along a very down-at-heel street.

In 1990, the congregation called Ruth Frost and Phyllis Zillhart as its pastors, lesbian graduates of a Lutheran seminary who had been disqualified from ordination on the grounds that they refused to pledge abstinence from sexual relations. (First United Lutheran in San Francisco at the same time called an irregularly ordained out gay man.)

Keep in mind that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America presents itself as heir to the radical ecclesiastical disobedience of Martin Luther, when I say that nothing, nothing freaks the Lutheran hierarchy out like a refusal to capitulate to its authority. Years of wrangling led eventually to a classically Lutheran judgment. A commission struck to address the unsanctioned ordinations found that the congregation had acted in accordance with the dictates of the Gospel, and recommended that the ELCA in fact ought to reverse its position; but because St. Francis had failed to comply with good church order, the congregation had until January 1, 1996 to revoke its call to Ruth and Phyllis or else would be excommunicated from the national church—unless the national church in the meantime reversed its policy forbidding the ordination of out gay and lesbian seminarians who refused to pledge celibacy.

On the night of December 31, 1995, the congregation walked the walk by celebrating what they dubbed the Feast of the Expulsion with a big party in the church basement. As the congregation’s website (www.sflcsf.org) puts it in describing the next chapter of its history, “In the face of this judgment against us, we, along with our companion congregations, continued to stand by our decision, and continued to celebrate our diversity as part of our everyday journey with Christ.”

I first walked into St. Francis in 2000. There were maybe thirty-five people in a sanctuary that a hundred and twenty would pack to near capacity. As the Gospel book was carried in a very short procession into the middle of the congregation, everyone turned to face the reader, business as usual in “high” Lutheran congregations. Not so business-as-usual was that as people turned, they also crowded from the pews into the central aisle, hands laid on shoulders in a web that knit the whole assembly into a single body with a living voice at its center. And I lost it.

I was a mess all over again after Mass, when I walked out into the columbarium garden that flanks the church to the south, where the ashes of dozens of members rest—most of them gay men who died of AIDS in the 80’s and 90’s, when this church was a place of refuge from the complacent indifference of denominational hierarchies.

But long before I’d walked through the door of St. Francis—and long before I’d made the decision to reclaim the flawed, problematic inheritance of the faith I was reared in—I knew Those People at That Church: The St. Francis Lutheran Cookbook. It’s long out of print. If you can find a copy, grab it. This isn’t a volume of jello salads and tuna casseroles. It’s got the best broiled polenta recipe I’ve ever made, a wickedly spicy and variously flavored corn salad, and the cookies baked for Bill Clinton’s inaugural gala.

But far, far better, its cover sports a collage of the campiest, most joyful parish photo album imaginable: octogenarian matrons offering strawberries to the viewer, middle-aged guys wearing colanders as Easter hats, a lesbian couple standing back to back and crossing turkey drumsticks as they look over their shoulders to the camera, buff shirtless gymboys in barbecue aprons, smiling eight-month-old babies holding cupcakes. (Oh--and heterosexual couples. Did I mention heterosexual couples?) Sidebars flanking the recipes tell the story of the congregation and its witness, up to the date of publication in 1994, when expulsion from the ELCA loomed.

The lumbering behemoth that is the institutional church finally caught up to St. Francis Lutheran in 2010, and the congregation was readmitted to the ELCA. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s the ELCA that was finally reunited to St. Francis Lutheran Church. I know where the promise of freedom and grace lay, for me and people like me, during those intervening years that this quirky, outrageously brave little community went its own way for the sake of Truth and Love.

Get Over It

At left, Keith Haring's AIDS altarpiece at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City.

I’ve talked with a lot of queer men, over many years, about their experiences of organized religion. If any of us has completely escaped being wounded by the God Squad, I haven’t met him yet. Some of us have internalized vast, toxic reservoirs of homophobia. Some of us push back against the lies and bigotry with rage and alienation. Some of us learn just to switch off the voices of oppression—but end up switching off along with them everything else that speaks of spirit and soul in our lives.

If I reflect on my own experience, I’ve more or less done all three, more or less in turn. And I’ve gone on to rebuild my spirituality through long struggle, enabled by sheer gifts from unlooked-for quarters—the kinds of gifts that go beyond good fortune and can best be described as Grace. But if I’m really honest, I have to admit that those earlier stages still operate in my life, layered on top of each other, sometimes coming to the surface in turn, like geological strata of soil and rock.

I’m grateful—more grateful than I can say—that the homophobic guilt that robbed me of so much joy and spontaneity as a young man doesn’t any longer control my life, but its trace still lingers. It shapes the way I think about the ethics of sexual pleasure. It tinges with a certain defensiveness even my most sex-positive understanding of my inner life as a gay man: I may assert that my sexuality is a gift of the Mystery I choose to call God, but I always, somewhere deep within, have something to prove, and I’m never completely free of the need to push back against the repressive voices of my earlier years. Sometimes I push back with a renewed rage against the likes of (these days) Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum. (And take great delight in what Dan Savage succeeded in doing to Santorum’s Google profile.) Sometimes I want just to ignore those voices as irrelevant, and unworthy of my ongoing attention.

I see our spiritual woundedness as queer men—and our erotic woundedness as spiritual men—continuing to shape the possibilities of our lives whenever we close ourselves off from practices tainted with the association of past repression. I’m thinking here of the queer Catholic boys who can no longer look at a rosary; of the queer Jewish boys who haven’t darkened the door of a shul in decades. I’m thinking of my own deep aversion to many of the liturgical practices of Lent, which way too often conjure up for me self-hating celebrations of denial and retrogressive notions of personal, individualized guilt that inevitably include an implication of sexual impurity.

The toxic associations of the rituals of our upbringing often close us off from continued participation. I’m the last person in the world to suggest that gay men shouldn’t trust their instinct for the aspects of their spiritual pasts they have to leave behind in order to affirm themselves and move forward. But I’m also struck by how complex a blend of anger, empowerment, and regret can be involved in such refusals.

I’m struck by the number of possibilities we close off by not remaining open to rituals, symbols, and language that shaped our early experiences. We tend to get away from such trappings of our early religious indoctrination as fast as we can, avoiding the pain, or discomfort, or embarrassment, or impatience, associated with them. But instead of rejecting them outright, we might choose to take control over them and repurpose them in ways that serve our growth.

Here’s what I’m suggesting, then, for something new in 2012.

Pick some specific practice that you’ve left behind because it no longer serves you. Maybe it’s saying grace at the beginning of a meal. Maybe it’s Shabbas Eve dinner. Maybe it’s praying the rosary. Or Friday prayers at the mosque. Or lighting a votive candle before an altar. Or turning a prayer wheel. Or a Pentecostal altar call. Maybe it’s reading the scripture of the tradition you grew up with and have more or less left behind.

Perhaps go out on a long walk while you think about it. Notice what associations it calls up, what you feel in reaction to it. Ask yourself whether, beneath the negative associations, there’s something you regret about losing access to it. And ask yourself, what would it be like to revisit this practice, as the man you are now, without apology, on your own terms? Could you claim it as your own, as an out queer man, and assert that it no longer means what was handed to you, but what you choose to understand that it means, now, for you?

You may not decide to reclaim it as an ongoing part of your spiritual experience and practice. But you’ll expand your world and claim back territory you’ve relinquished. Two of my teachers, Michael Cohen and Collin Brown, often observe that our task is to turn our wounds into gifts, and that we create safety for ourselves not by avoiding risks, but by taking them. This is as true of revisiting the site of our early spiritual woundings as it is of other, more easily visible risks that we might take.

Light the candles at sundown on Friday. Or answer the altar call. Or say the rosary. Or turn the prayer wheel. Say to yourself, this is mine, to make into what I need it to be, to keep or to let go of on my own terms.

En Plein Air--A Guest Post by Tantrika au Naturale

Since receiving the request from David to share MY RITUAL, I have struggled to identify whether I have a suitable ritual and, if so, how to communicate it.



It is easy to state what ritual is not for me:
• It is not a supplication for personal benefit from a Santa Claus/Godfather celestial master
• It is not a sacrificial appeasement of other worldly destructive forces
• It is not the means of personal sanctification.

Rather, ritual for me is the vehicle for departure from the multi-tasking chaos of everyday life into the unity of simply being: the integration of my body-mind-spirit as the small self realizes the universal Self. The overt manifestation of this process is my morning yoga practice: a mélange of active and quiescent traditions linked by awareness of breath. This practice is done within a contrived sacred space before a contrived altar.

A less overt but equally valid ritual, I now realize, is my avocation of en plein air aquarelle (water color painting outdoors). This is a less contrived ritual of self and Self integration achieved through acceptance of all sensory perceptions to pass through noted without judgment or grasping. Perhaps this poem can convey the process whereby the accompanying images came to be.

En plein air

In Montana
Between yoga sessions
I gravitate
To a natural carin atop a small hill
Beneath prayer flags.

As in years before (and years to come)
I set out my supplies
And settle: rooting my body to untether my mind and spirit.

The fluidity of lodgepole pines and rainbow flags and body hairs
Delineates the peaks and troughs of the wind
Announced in Doppler sound of arboreal chimes.
This moment’s light and warmth, having departed a nuclear holocaust eight minutes before,
Fleeting white clouds across a cerulean canopy play hide-and-seek with
On-again, off-again shadow modulating vision and temperature.

Illusory perceptions condense
Activating the pencil line, the color choice, the brush stroke
There is no objective: my painting is not commissioned, will not be sold and only viewed by a few
A keep sake of surrender to Unity.

Not All Sweetness and Light

I don’t remember a year in which I’ve been so acutely aware of bright afternoon sunlight as sheer, fleeting gift in late December; nor one in which falling darkness has felt so absolute. I’m trying to sort out how much geography accounts for my heightened awareness: I’ve never before spent a whole winter on eastern Long Island, so close to the leading edge of the time zone that night falls before 5 p.m. The light slants down with a clarity that’s almost a cliché; but the grey of an overcast winter day here somehow sucks the light out of even a well-lit room.

Reminders of mortality all around me account for a lot of what geography can’t explain: a spectacularly gifted friend whom I much admired, dead in November long before his time; another, deeply beloved, with whom I share nearly twenty years of intimate, varied connection, now newly battling an aggressive recurrence of cancer; a third I’ve come to know this last year and a half, now living with a recent diagnosis of lymphoma. All of them, my age or younger. I find myself noticing every ache and pain, and thinking to myself, what kind of cancer could I get?

Hanukkah begins tomorrow at sundown; Thursday (if you’re being astronomically exact about it) comes the Solstice; and Christmas lights are everywhere. I’ve always loved this season—loved it for the poignant bravery of light kindled in darkness. This year, I find myself looking for the lesson somewhere in the darkness itself. In the silence, in the not knowing, in the nothingness that the light shines out of. In giving the darkness its due, before moving too quickly into the attempts to lighten it.

Kevin Smith, in an eloquent and wise and funny post to his TouchPractice blog just a few days ago, wrote this: “Here’s a holiday wish: embrace your bleakest self, the shadow self. That side that you’re NOT listing on your resume these days. The photos that you’re NOT posting. Just look at it. Acknowledge it. And lest you fear that doing so in some way might grant the part of yourself that you’re not thrilled with some sort of permanence, consider that nothing gets granted permanence, neither the things we love about ourselves nor our biggest disappointments.” (http://touchpractice.com)

I have no idea what I’ll find over the next days, but I know where I need to look for it: wrapped up against the cold, listening to the surf crash, on a beach where perhaps I’ll see stars in the night sky, or perhaps, huddled below cloud, see almost nothing at all.

And then, yes—but only at last—kindle a light.

And One More New Tarot

0 The Trickster
The banana peel, the one who drops it, and the one who slips on it, all rolled into One. When you’re expecting something, the Big Zero you get. When you’re expecting nothing, the Big Surprise. The bait, the catch, hook, line, and sinker. You name it.

My Bracelet of Surrender: A Guest Post by Steve Brammeier

Here Steve shares his experience of creating and walking with a prayer that can be held in the hand--and perhaps call the mind back when it decides to go off in another direction.

My Spiritual practice isn't always the same. Sometimes, I feel that I'm failing because I'm not disciplined in specific spiritual ritual and therefore less spiritual. I'm fortunate enough to have an extra bedroom that serves as a "quiet room." I have my altar there. There's also an easy chair for comfortable sitting and enough room to set up a massage table. My altar holds items that are sacred to me; things that have come into my life at special times, or from individuals who have touched my life. For a while I was meditating every morning for ten minutes or so at my altar. In the last few months I seem antsy when I try to do that every day. I feel like my day is pulling me into it.

At the suggestion of a mentor well-versed in the spiritual practices of many different cultures, I decided to create a beaded bracelet as a ritual that could become a portable sacred object. I was fortunate to be at Easton Mountain during the summer, with Easton's wonderful “Beading Tree,” an outdoor craft studio created by Hunter Reynolds, as a resource. I didn't have a specific theme or design in mind as I made my bracelet. I just found beads that appealed to me and assembled them. The finished product ended up being highly symbolic of earth, fire, wind and water. I place the bracelet on my altar and frequently take it with me into my day. When I get to work, I take it off, wrapping in around my wallet, which I place in my desk drawer, so I'm less likely to forget it when I leave. Then before I go to bed I place it back on my altar, spending a few minutes connecting with the sacred objects there.

The bracelet became a large part of my Vision Quest experience this summer in Colorado. I took the bracelet into nature on my solo of four days of fasting. I kept it tied in a bandana with the rest of my sacred objects. I would open the bandana every morning as part of my ritual on the mountain. On the third day, I took the bracelet on a meditating walk through the forest. I held it in my hand, moving from bead to bead as I walked. Later that day back at my campsite, I realized I did not have the bracelet. I looked through everything multiple times. I was devastated that somehow I had lost it. How could this object that had come to me in such a meaningful way and become so sacred to me be lost? How could I now believe in whatever seemed to me to be intuitively connecting with me? I knew it was just an object, but it held my hope, my joy, and my trust in the knowledge of my own spirit.

I became despondent. I considered ending my solo time on the mountain early. I went deep into the shadow of doubt. I climbed into my sleeping bag well before sundown and stewed in my own juices of misery.

The next morning I resolved to retrace my steps, figuring I likely would come across the place where I'd set it down. There is not a lot else to do alone on the mountain and no one else there to pick it up, so I went out again. It was not a frantic walk, but a quiet, deliberate, thoughtful search. I did not find it. Part of my practice on the mountain also included drawing Animal Spirit cards. My card that morning called me to "surrender." So, I resolved that my spiritual path could be less about actively seeking or searching and more about surrendering to what was being put in front of me: my bracelet and my guidance would "find" me if I keep an open awareness.

More things transpired that day and night, but that realization was a turning point. I moved out of the shadow and came down the mountain the next morning as scheduled, feeling strong.

Two days later, while riding my bicycle from Breckenridge to Frisco, I discovered a little bead shop. I went in to see what I could find and ended up with specific intention recreating my bracelet—this his time with a stretchy cord that allows it to fit perfectly over my hand and snugly on my wrist. It has almost exactly the same design and has come to be a significant part of my life. I feel like spirit taught me a huge lesson and my bracelet indeed "found" me again.

A Few More New Tarot

Three more of the Major Arcana from the alternative Tarot deck on which I collaborated with Sara Norquay.

X The Miser
Losing his fist would give him back his hand. He’s too stuck with the reality of the one to imagine the other. What’s killing him seems the only thing that keeps him alive. A windfall received as though it were a God-given right. A privilege defended to the death.

XI The Matchmaker
An alliance effected from outside. The web of connections from which a particular connection emerges. Social agony. Grounds for a lawsuit.

XII The Foundling
Hope floating precariously. Waters of life, or of destruction. The protection of temporary obscurity. Eventual victory or vindication.

In Memoriam Oscar Wolfman, 1956-2011

We lost one of our best queer artists this week, a man whose vision was as idiosyncratic and unsettling as it was fresh and luminous, whose photography is, as he often said, “too Jewish for most queers, and too queer for most Jews.”


More often than not, Oscar Wolfman’s sexiest nudes are shot through with allusions to the Torah, the Psalms, the Prophets. An aging, muscular man dances naked in a tallis. A young woman in a blue turban and white stole out of Caravaggio prepares to drive a spike through the ear of a man sleeping with his head in her lap, in a scene that tropes the story of Yael and Sisera from the Book of Judges. Human flesh never appears apart from the charge of desire; nor apart from its mutability and mortality. Still lifes gleam with rich, saturated colour, fruit and fabric vibrating against impossibly pure blacks.


Oscar was early on a dancer, a choreographer, later a high-school English teacher, then a university teacher of sociology. He came to photography late in a life that should have gone on for decades more. He was charming, irreverent; unabashedly forward, unselfconscious, and casual in speaking about his own sexual experience and pleasure; shy, introspective, perceptive; a brilliant and generous commentator on the creative work of others; the child of Holocaust survivors; a man who hungered and thirsted after righteousness.

He lived long enough to see the High Holidays this fall; to curate a last solo exhibition of his work at Queen Gallery in Toronto last month; to prepare for his death with the same care, dignity, and grace with which he lived. Those of us who knew him feel the impoverishment of our lives for his absence. Those of us who know his work bless his memory and the Source of his life for what he brought into the world.

Oscar’s photography remains at present on view at his website: www.wolfmanstudio.ca. His biography and further images are at http://queengallery.ca/2010/07/oscar-wolfman/. Photographer Bill Pusztai shares his memories and his own splendid, joyous pictures of Oscar, at http://bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com/820258.html.

The Soul Upon the Skin: Larson Rose's Reflections on Body Painting as Spiritual Practice

"... I never suspected that [my body painting practice] would have such a huge emotional impact on the men who volunteered to participate with me. I was actually surprised at first how the men reacted. I watched shy men prancing about painted and naked, inviting pictures to be taken of them and openly desiring men to look closely at their bodies. Bodies that they weren’t so thrilled about earlier in the day. I have been told by men that they experienced for the first time in their lives being able to simply lie still and relax for an hour and a half. I have seen tears, laughter and a great deal of gratitude. Some men are rather speechless and stare at their images in amazement. I have been told that it has changed a few people’s lives.

"For me, my body painting practice has increased my awareness of the intuitive gifts I am so blessed to have and how important my work can be. I confirm and reconfirm that I must stop denying to myself that my psychic, sexual and spiritual side is a powerful force for positive change. That my upbringing and prejudices about doing spiritual work, energy work, intuitive work, body work, needs to continue to be challenged. That I need to be proud of what I am able to bring to the world as a spiritual gay man and not apologize for it. Which is also what inspired me to share this in writing..."

For Larson's full reflections on why he paints naked men--and for more examples of his work--see the page in Ritual Resources and the photos to the right.

A Few New Tarot

Three Major Arcana from an alternative Tarot deck: my version of cards from a collaboration with Sara Norquay

XIII The Costume Mistress
The putting on or off of an assumed role. A tension between freedom and restraint. A combination of seemingly disparate possibilities. Fluid identity. Inverted: the compulsion to perform a part imposed upon the individual.

XIV The Front Man
Deceptive congeniality, disguised malice, or at least hypocrisy. An immanent collapse of what has seemed stable.

XV The Customs Broker
A facilitator of border crossings. Specialized or arcane knowledge available for a price. Passage from one state to another.