On Ritual Authenticity

 The fourth and 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: 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. 

4. A Dodgy Road Through the Middle of the Red Sea

So, in sum--what do gay/bi/+ men's rituals need to embody, for them to offer us, for our liberation and growth? For one thing: a shameless self-awareness that we're making this up as we go along. New Age parashamanism (see the second post of this series, two before this one) often gets tangled up in its own insecurities about standing outside the mainstream of our secular, individualistic culture. 

Laying claim to lines of oral transmission from hidden traditions, in order to mystify one's own authority, is a defensive strategy: "I received this teaching while channeling a five-thousand-year-old Celtic druid named Shebugarictorix." So is making pseudo-scientific claims about a ritual: "Applying this crystal to your third eye will cure your migraines." Or else, talking the meaning of a ritual to death, instead of trusting that it can speak for itself.

In short, parashamanism defends itself from the disenchantments of modern skepticism by projecting a fantasy of wholeness, power, and unquestioning acceptance. That fantasy is especially dangerous when it refuses to consider the role the parashaman's own internal issues get projected into the ritual work–and so lay some very questionable countertransferences onto client-participants.

 

So what sets queer men's authentic ritual work apart from all this? I'd say just this: good queer ritual doesn't give into anxiety about its marginal status in a skeptical modernist world, but instead takes it as a given and embraces it. And beyond embracing it: takes it as grounds for self-reflection and deeper awareness. Our sense of irony, our ability to hold two attitudes toward what we're doing at once--these are the resources that keep good queer ritual honest. Our liminal experience of the world--not standing inside the mainstream, but not standing completely apart from it either, our constant crossing of borders--turns out to be our greatest gift for keeping ritual honest. I've already said it, but I'll say it again: our liminal status isn't just a condition of what we do. We need to incorporate it explicitly into the rituals we create together.

That's pretty abstract, so let me offer an example. Queer men's retreats often feature a communal altar, with an invitation for participants to bring their own sacred objects to add to it. The very act of doing that acknowledges that we're coming together for a limited time, and then we'll pick up our objects and separate again. But what if we deliberately heighten that awareness by making our altar-building the focus of an opening sharing circle, where each man speaks about the object he's brought, then takes it to the altar, rings a bell, and bows to the altar he's helping to create, with his object, with his words, with his actions? What if the last sharing circle of the gathering does the reverse, with each man talking about his experience of the gathering, then going up to the altar and removing his object, so that taking the altar apart again embodies the lesson of our intermittent community?

A second point: let's be honest in our ritual practice that our sexual desire for other men is foundational to the intermittent communities we create. That doesn't mean that our rituals have to incorporate orgies. But we need rituals that embody our awareness of erotic desire as the force that causes us to come together in the first place. On the one hand, using ritual as an excuse for group sex can pretty quickly tip over into all the perils of parashamanism I've reviewed. But if we're too squeamish about spontaneous erotic expression being part of our rituals, maybe we've internalized the antiierotic and homophobic attitudes of mainstream culture.

Again, an example to make this less abstract: we can set up an emblem of male homoeroticism as the focal point of a ritual; or else create that emblem in the ritual itself.

A third point: queer camp is always about celebrating the Trickster incongruities of our lives. This is what radical drag has always been about. It's central to Radical Faerie culture. It's the genius of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. And yet another example: the humour of some of the panels in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, side by side with grief, loss, and the longing for healing. There are hundreds of examples of this in the Quilt. One of my favorites depicts a man on a piano bench doing a high kick in platform heels with the caption, "Is this art? No! It's Fred Abrams!"

Fourth, and finally: we borrow, when we need to, from established spiritual traditions--none of which have served us particularly well on their own terms. The spiritual abuse many of us have suffered from our traditions of origin often leads to total alienation from them. Sometimes, that's the healthiest response available to us, at least for the time being. But it means we also leave behind what was life-giving in them. Sometimes, we have to go back through the wreckage to find what can still serve us, on our own terms. 

Sometimes, we have to borrow what calls to us from traditions that aren't our own--also on our own terms. Eclectic appropriation of borrowed religious traditions always involves questions of colonialism and power differentials. But at the same time, there's no such thing as a self-contained "pure"  tradition that hasn't already incorporated its own cross-cultural borrowings. 

Queer culture's genius for undercutting itself means we can reimagine the ways we pick and chose and repurpose what we find in different traditions. In the ritual actions we cobble together from different sources, we embrace a tradition and distance ourselves from it at the same time. This too, is our radical drag of the soul. Auntie may not approve of what we've done with the Dior gown we found at the back of her closet. But we know we look fabulous in it.

A case in point: there's an episode in the story of the Exodus that can serve us really well. As the Hebrew slaves take off for destinations unknown, at the command of a weird-ass god who won't even show his face, they carry with them the jewelry the Egyptians have handed over in an uncharacteristic moment of generosity. Maybe what we piece together from one tradition and another is our way of carrying off loot from the Egyptians. To borrow a provocative assertion by José Estaban Muñoz, "we are not yet queer." Meaning that we're still on our way, like a bunch of escaped slaves heading through the Red Sea, and then on into the wilderness. 

We still don't fully know what a concrete ritual community of queer men might look like: what rites it might devise; what golden calves might prove in the end an ill-advised experiment; what detours through the wilderness it might find itself taking. Sometimes the voices of established spiritual traditions have been prophets calling us out of bondage in Egypt; at least as often, they've been instead the armies of Pharaoh we have to flee; sometimes, they've just been the Red Sea that we have to cross. A genuinely queer riff on Exodus can begin by recognizing that at one time or another, they're capable of being all three.