On Ritual Authenticity

 In this and several more intallments, here comes 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.

1. Life on the Margins

I'm absolutely convinced that our inner lives as queer men are enriched and deepened by creative ritual practice. 

Yet I get really uneasy hearing people talk about ritual as though it doesn't change across time, or from one community to another. So instead, I'll start by sharing how I think we experience community with other gay/bi/+ men.

The social and spiritual conditions of queer life in North American society have always been in flux. There's no stable cultural position for us to talk about something we all agree on as "queer men's community." The gay movement had a long and winding road, from the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969, through opposition to the homophobic backlashes of the later 1970's and early 1980's, to the ways gay community was experienced in the face of the AIDS crisis. 

By the 1990s, a lot of radical ideals started to fade. Some of us gave up wanting sexual revolution and started just asking for "a place at the table" (to borrow the title of Bruce Bawer's 1993 book). We stopped having sex on the piers along the Hudson and started shopping for wedding rings. "Will and Grace" superseded "Angels in America."

And in reaction to that, “gay” as an identity marker came in for hostile criticism among more radical activists, who faulted "gay" as assimilationist, gender-normative, white, and middle class. They advocated for “queer” as a broader but less clearly defined label--one that conveyed greater inclusivity and resisted mainstream values. 

Through all this, it got harder to hang onto a sense of commonality about how homoeroticism shapes our deep experience of the world. Gay men's advancement further into mainstream society paradoxically gave us more to lose if we pressed issues of identity without compromise: for many, good-mannered discretion replaced the closet as a means of keeping us in line. 

(But let's acknowledge here that I'm talking about gay men with some level of economic and ethnic privilege. The most radical among us have always included those marginalized along other lines as well. Drag queens and transgendered people of colour were the vanguard of resistance at Stonewall.) 

A generation ago, large numbers of us still congregated in tightly defined, vibrant neighbourhoods, to avoid persecution, and to seek social connections and sex. Most gay ghettos in 2024 are depressing shadows of what they were at their peak. Privatizing, tightly targeted online cruising doesn't often result in a web of flexible, socially open-ended relationships. (OK, it's also pretty obvious that web-based connection has opened up informational, social, and political resources unthinkable thirty years ago.)

And yet--even if identity politics have shifted dramatically, queer men still share a “culture of desire” (to borrow the title of Frank Browning's 1994 book) that shapes the possibilities and challenges of our inner lives. Despite legal advances (at least in some jurisdictions--and with legal setbacks in others), despite heigthened visibility in popular culture, despite widening zones where we can safely live an out life without continuous fear of reprisal, we still lives our lives on the margins. 

Our status as a “not-visible” minority still encourages us to internalize homophobia. Not being a "visible minority" quickly leads to being an invisible minority:  hiding in plain sight continues to offer practical advantages and prevent unpleasant consequences. The rising forces of Christian nationalism mean that this is even truer now, on the cusp of 2025, than it was ten years ago.

Our spiritual lives are still shaped by our embodied experience as men, and by our desire for other men. They're shaped by the irrelevance of much of our sexual life to biological reproduction--and how we relate our erotic life to questions of the life cycle. They're shaped by our relatively limited access to intergenerational mentoring and modelling. In short, our spiritual lives are shaped by our liminal (“inside/outside”) relationship to straight-majority culture--all the more so given our widespread ability to pass as straight when we choose or are forced to do so. 

I don't see much to suggest that we'll stop being an identifiable population, with distinctive interior experiences and distinctive spiritual needs, any time in the foreseeable future. I don't for a moment buy it when I hear somebody say that gay (or bi, or queer) identity no longer matters.

Our participation in "mainstream" spiritual communities doesn't--and in fact can't--fully address our circumstances and needs. The mandate of progressive denominations, or of progressive “welcoming” congregations within denominations, encourages us to incorporate into a more broadly identified whole. Such institutions aim (rightfully) to create wider and more inclusive communities. 

But we can't expect from them much support for deepening our experience of being-in-the-world as queer men, or for reflecting on it. "Mainstream" spiritual groups can only go so far in helping us integrate that reflection into self-fulfillment, self-development–and (eventually, one hopes) self-transcendence. However welcoming progressive mainstream institutions strive to be, if we depend on them entirely, they'll always exert a strong centrifugal pull that risks isolating us from one another, as much as they bring us together. 

If authentic ritual enhances the spiritual lives of individuals-in-community, the ritual life of mainstream institutions can't fully answer the ritual needs of queer men as queer men. Even for those of us who find such institutions welcoming and helpful, they can't serve adequately to affirm the specific communal bonds among us.

We have to find our own way.

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.

The Gay Faith of Anthony Oliveira, Once More

The fabulous author of Dayspring, as interviewed by Anthony Milton in Toronto Life:

You've written a gay love story about Christ and other biblical figures. Some people may get riled up about that. 

It's funny to imagine people being mad about any deptiction of a Christ who is loving. If there's anything worth saving about Christianity--and maybe there isn't--it's the idea that God was once a human being, and therefore there's nothing about us that is unworthy of love....

I want people to read this and say, "This is the Christ that I knew existed but that everyone has been hiding from me."

The Queerest Book in the Bible

She's the foreign widow of a man who died, along with all the other men his family, as an economic refugee from his own country to hers. Only her mother-in-law, also widowed, is left. Once the famine back home is over, the mother-in-law will take her chances on returning to the town of her birth, hoping not to starve in destitution.  

But there's nothing left for the two women who married the deceased sons. One of the daughters-in-law does what's most likely to assure her own survival: she returns to her own family. But the other daughter-in-law refuses to leave the side of the older woman.

"Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people," says Ruth to her mother-in-law Naomi.

She braves the hostility of a country that has nothing but contempt for the place from which she comes. They arrive in Bethlehem and start scavenging for food. A wealthy landowner connected to Naomi by blood sees Ruth at the Iron Age equivalent of the food bank and turns out to be a decent mensch. Naomi and Ruth together hatch a plan that involves his seduction. (Yes, his seduction--I'm not going further into it now.) He marries Ruth, and she births a son.

Who turns out, the last verses of the book of Ruth tell us, to be the grandfather of King David. King David, the anointed of the Lord. King David, the offspring of a mixed bloodline: his great-grandmother an undesirable resident alien. King David, the ancestor of another well-known guy, who by ordinary appearances was the out-of-wedlock son of a pregnant teenager, who likewise was married by another decent mensch. 

Christian nationalists: put that on your plate and eat it. Steven Miller, to the head of the line, please.

But the story isn't just about welcoming the stranger--an impulse that was voted down by the American public this last Tuesday. It's also about the chosen bond between two women, which is stronger than any other in the story. When Ruth bears her son, the women of Bethlehem declare that "a son has been born to Naomi." Boaz is a sweet guy, but he's basically the donor dad in a queer family of choice.

Christian nationalists: put that on your plate too. Ron DeSantis, to the head of the line, please.

Now

The Talmud

 

The Handmaid's Tale, Coming Soon To You

This morning, the Editorial Board of the New York Times posted the following to the paper's webpage. 

"You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump's corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: it's his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he's re-elected, the G.O.P. won't restrain him. 

"Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents, He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote."

What needs to be added here, on a blog about queer men's journey toward a freer, fuller life: he will empower every right-wing Christian nationalist who praises him as God's Anointed. What he did to women's control of their own bodies by appointing three right-wing hacks to the Supreme Court, he will do as well to sexual and erotic freedom, with vindictive heartlessness. 

So once again: for your own sake, for freedom's sake, for all our sakes. VOTE.

The Golden Calf, courtesy of the progressive Christian group Faithful America

Richard Rohr: A Loving Voice

One holy man who came to visit me recently put it this way, "We must listen to what is supporting us. We must listen to what is encouraging us. We must listen to what is urging us. We must listen to what is alive in us." I personally was so trained not to trust those voices that I think I often did not hear the voice of God speaking to me or what Abraham Lincoln called the "better angels of our nature." Yes, a narcissistic person can and will misuse such advice, but a genuine God lover will flourish inside such a dialogue. 

We must learn how to recognize the positive flow and to distinguish it from the negative resistance within ourselves. It can take years, if not a lifetime. If a voice comes from accusation and leads to accusation, it is quite simply the voice of the "Accuser," which is the literal meaning of the biblical word "Satan." Shaming, accusing, or blaming is simply not how God talks, but sadly, it is too often how we talk--to ourselves and to one another. God is supremely nonviolent; I've heard that from the saints and mystics that I have read and met and heard about. That many holy people cannot be wrong.

Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (New York, Convergent, 2019, 2021), pp. 88-89. Adapted in the Center for Action and Contemplation's daily meditation, October 21, 2024.

Two Days of Embodied Joy

Twenty-two years ago, a Body Electric workshop changed my life for good.

One spring weekend in 2002, "Celebrating the Body Erotic" worked its indelible magic on my body, heart, and soul. Twenty-two men met one another as nervous strangers at 8:45 on Saturday morning. By 7 Sunday night, we were a band united and transformed in "the dear love of comrades," as Walt Whitman might well have put it.

I learned to breathe as though making friends with my lungs for the first time. I leaned to touch myself with a level of pleasure and unashamed abandon that I wish had been available to me--as it should have been--at my adolescent awakening over thirty years earlier. I learned to share those gifts with the men with whom I'd embarked on this two-day adventure. With astonishing speed and ease, we built for each other  a space of safety and unconditional acceptance, where we could all flourish. We reached out to each other with delight and respect. I experienced, with a shattering intensity, the presence of the Sacred in my own body, and in the bodies of the other men who bared their souls and flesh. It left me weeping tears of joy, at the oddest and most upredictable moments, for weeks afterwards.

For forty years, the Body Electric School has offered a precious, life-giving vessel of deep erotic wisdom, a source of healing and growth, self-discovery and community. Its mission began amidst the physical, psychological, and spiritual trauma of the AIDS crisis. In the mid-1980's, founder Joseph Kramer extended a lifeline to men struggling to affirm the wholeness of their erotic selves in the face of that threat. Over the years, its programming has widened in scope to include workshops open to multiple genders and orientations--while continuing to offer single-gender workshops that provide safe space for men who need to do the work of erotic, emotional, and spiritual self-realization with one another.

The School's centre of gravity has always been in the US, and its presence in Canada limited by comparison. Celebrating the Body Erotic was last offered in Toronto in 2016. Happily, it will return there this fall, the weekend of November 22-24. 

If you've never experienced the work of Body Electric, or if you're ready to return, and if you live within traveling distance, you couldn't spend a weekend in better service to your one wild and precious life.

Our Only Holiness

Photograph by Andrew Graham

"Our only holiness is by participation and surrender to the Body of Love, and not by any private performance."

--Richard Rohr

The Moon Sings to the Stream

Philip Gladstone, "The Twenty"

I am the unity on high,

I am the multiple in the pond.

looking up to me from the stream

my image, my double.

I am the truth on high,

I am the fabrication in the pond

looking up to me from the stream

my image, in its fated deception.

Above--I am enwrapped in silence,

whispering, singing, in the pond.

On high I am divine,

in the stream, I am the prayer.

--Leah Goldberg (1911-1970)

5785

 

LISTEN!

What do you hear?

A wake-up call at dawn?

An animal in pain?

An air-raid siren?

The cry of an injured child?

The wail of a mourner?

The sound of the world being born?