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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
