The third and next to last 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 supprot in conditions of full visibility and community.
Content warning: abstract, theoretical language and some long sentences.
3. "Emerging Ritual"
I have more this time to say about the idea of "emerging ritual," a phrase coined by the Canadian scholar/practitioner Ronald Grimes. Grimes ran a "Ritual Laboratory" at the University of Waterloo in Ontario starting in the 1980s, where students made up group rituals from scratch, and analyzed why and how what the results worked. Grimes says a lot that speaks to our search for rituals that support our lives as gay/bi/+ men in community with each other,
First: ritual traditons are always in flux. They're always adapting to new historical and cultural circumstances. There's no hard distanction between the forms that we create experimentally and more established traditions. The rituals of heteronormative culture are no more "real," no more "authentic," than what we create out of our own shared queer experience.
Second: good ritual doesn't just express abstract ideas. It's a practice that embodies and generates its own kind of knowledge. When we're engaged in ritual, we simultaneously know what we're doing and have have no idea what we're doing. We're immersed in it, and at the same time able to reflect on it, learn from it, and shape it in response to what we've learned. Ritual action isn't secondary to understanding and knowledge, or to the experience of community. Good ritual creates understanding and knowledge. Good ritual creates experiences of community.
Third: in response to Grimes's criticisms of New Age workshop culture, which I talked about last week. The temporary community of workshop culture presupposes that we're all free agents and will go back to a private life that doesn't have much to do with the private lives of other participants. In contrast, intermittent community among queer men draws on the depth and continuity of the bonds that bring us together. We live continuously across the threshold between a queer world and a wider heteronormative culture. Our gatherings may be temporary, but the underlying gravitations that draw us together are enduring.
We need to pay attention to this as we build a queer ritual life for ourselves and each other. The energies that repeatedly draw us together need to be directly expressed in queer men’s ritual community. Mutual erotic desire, and the shared experience of oppression, or at least the experience of living on the margins, aren't just underlying conditions of queer ritual community. We need to use them as focal points for celebration, reflection, transformation--and sometimes for critical reflection.
At the same time, for ritual to work, it has to be attuned to a wider cultural world to which we can relate our own lives. Like all humans, everywhere and forever, we're always borrowing. The elements of authentic quuer ritual can be ridiculously ordinary. When we cobble powerful rituals together out of found fragments of daily life, we reflect the provisional, intermittent experience of queer connection.
At other times we draw from established spiritual traditions, selecting what's useful and rejecting what's proven toxic. It's our radical drag of the soul. No matter what the source, the trickster genius of queer life lets us see both the profundity and absurdity of a ritual form. Good queer ritual always contains a healthy dose of implicit self-criticism. Our rituals at their best are informed by the radical skepticism of authority that permeates much of gay life. We have a great gift for both immersing ourselves in a profound experience and demystifying it.
Anyone who's wept over a drag queen lipsyncing "Like a Prayer" knows what I'm talking about.
Or take two scenes from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. At the end of Part One, Prior, the protagonist, has been increasingly troubled by the visitation of angelic messengers announcing his election as a prophet--or are the visions a symptom of advancing dementia? He lies alone and desperately ill in his bedroom. The room quakes, the ceiling collapses above him, and a blinding white light from above bathes the bed and the stage around it in impossible incandescence. Gazing up into the light in terror, he exclaims, “God almighty... Very Steven Spielberg.” Then an angel descends to declare, “Greetings, Prophet. The Great Work begins: The Messenger has arrived.”
Near the end of Part Two, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg has been keeping vigil by Roy Cohn’s hospital bed during the last hours of his life: she is haunting him in revenge for his role in her execution during the McCarthy witch hunt. Immediately after Cohn’s death, the drag queen/nurse Belize charged with his care at the hospital summons Louis, a disaffected gay Jewish leftist, to say Kaddish over the body--ostensibly to give Belize an opportunity to smuggle Cohn’s private stash of experimental AZT (the time is February 1986) out of the room for distribution to PWA’s with no access to treatment.
Louis protests, in keeping with his leftist principles, that he will not recite the commemoration of the dead for Cohn; he then adds that in any case he can’t remember the prayer. Giving in, he stumbles through the first phrases, halts, then begins limping through half-remembered tags of Hebrew blessings. Ethel’s ghost rises from her chair in the corner of the room to coach Louis phrase by phrase through the long text. At the last "Amen," Ethel adds, and Louis repeats, "You sonofabitch." Loading the stolen drugs into Louis's backpack, Belize responds, “Thank you Louis, you did fine.” Louis responds, “Fine? What are you talking about, fine? That was fucking miraculous."
Madonna, Angels in America: they share in a rich tradition of queer popular culture that sets reverence for the Sacred side by side with iconoclasm. Louis asks with astonishment, “What are you talking about, fine? That was fucking miraculous.” The miracle is revealed as unmiraculous to the audience because we see Ethel’s ghost coaching Louis through a prayer as neither of the characters onstage sees her.
Yet on another level, it remains a marvel, if not a miracle, by the sheer fact of Ethel’s paranormal presence. Most importantly, it's miraculous in a more proper sense because of Ethel's deeply forgiving recognition of common humanity with the man responsible for her execution decades before.
Here, the transgressive edge of queer experience is aggressively foregrounded. Louis's prayer, and Ethel's forgiveness, aren't just miraculous. They're fucking miraculous, at the deathbed of a demonically powerful, hypocritically closeted bully fallen victim to a disease transmitted by fucking and getting fucked. The queer interpenetration of reverence and parody anchors the transcendent to the ordinary, literal level of reality and to the life of the body.
