www.gaypsychepolitics.blogspot.

com

My Response to Karen Ocamb’s News Report and Blog Commentary of

February 2009 Attacking the Protesters of Don Kilhefner and Mark
Thompson’s 2/15/09 One Archives Presentation on the Radical Faeries’
30th Anniversary

by Chris Kilbourne

In this statement, I would like to respond to various points raised in a Frontiers in L.A.
news report and associated blog commentary written by prominent LGBT journalist and
news editor Karen Ocamb that attacked a protest I participated in on February 15, 2009
against a presentation on the 30th anniversary of the Radical Faerie movement given by
gay community figures Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson. Because I believe important
issues are raised in the matter of the protest event and Karen’s handling of it that
require a certain expository care to realistically convey, it seems appropriate first to
relevantly frame the situation and context under discussion, and then accordingly
respond to Karen’s attacks more specifically in terms of those significant issues and
concerns at stake for gay people and our future.

To start with, let me explain that this is the second piece I am writing as a member of
the Gay Psyche Politics Collective, which is a group of gay-centered activists dedicated to
the next, inwardly-oriented psychological stage of gay liberation as a new and key
political effort both individually and communally needed in an oddly-stagnating age of
seemingly triumphant assimilationism in order to justly achieve a more completely
successful gay freedom, love, self, community and creative contribution to the world at
large. This visionary homosexual emancipatory comprehension of an ideological and
practical alternative to naïve gay assimilation has been inspired in large part by long-
time gay psychological activist Mitch Walker, co-founder of the Radical Faerie
movement and originator of gay-centered Jungian theory and practice.

The Collective sponsoring this blog originally came together to demonstrate against the
talk on the Faeries at the One National Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles by Don
Kilhefner, co-founder of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center and Jungian community
psychologist, and Mark Thompson, well-known gay editor and writer, in order to bring
attention to their questionable revisionist efforts, as detailed below, to nullify Mitch’s
historical leadership in, and the critical importance of, the better development of gay-
centered psychological awareness for the future sake of enhanced gay liberation success
starting with the Radical Faeries and thereafter. Indeed, Don’s and Mark’s partisan
censoring of Mitch is particularly disturbing because, many years ago, they were both
strongly allied with him. In fact, the Faerie movement, the first indigenous gay spiritual
organization of modern times, was started (along with Harry Hay, principal founder of
the original Mattachine Society in 1950) by Mitch and Don in 1979, and it was Mitch
who then invited his good friend Mark to soon join them. Don and Mitch then went on
in 1982 to start up the still-functioning Treeroots, Inc., an educational non-profit
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dedicated to forging a psychological approach in the progressive activist matter of better

addressing Gay Spirit realization, a strategic direction they both at the time strongly felt
was badly missing in the Radical Faeries to that movement’s detriment. The current
controversy over Faerie history developed after Don resigned from Treeroots in 1994,
going on to create the organization Tumescence, then the Gay Men’s Medicine Circle,
and now 100 Gay Men. As for Mark, he was very closely involved with Mitch (although
merely polite and somewhat distant with Don) for many years in the Radical Faeries and
Treeroots, until a painful controversy about his own conduct erupted in the later ’90s,
and he then also broke his association with Mitch. I know about this course of events
because I have myself been activist partners with Mitch since 1979, and was also for
many years in close personal and organizing relationships with both Don and Mark
beginning in 1980 or a bit earlier.

But you would not learn anything of this history by hearing or reading anything Don has
been saying or writing that I have heard about or seen, such as his regular column for
Frontiers in L.A., the local LGBT newsmagazine, or his various articles in White Crane,
the gay spirituality quarterly, wherein he incorporates many of Mitch’s pioneering ideas
including a Jungian psychological approach to gay activism (albeit in a superficial,
watered-down manner), but never credits Mitch there or in any of his other public
pronouncements. Further, Don additionally attempts to erase Mitch from the gay
history record in his bios that have regularly appeared in his brochures and articles,
where he names himself along with Harry Hay as co-founders of the Radical Faeries,
consistently failing to appropriately include Mitch. And then this past year, he published
his three-part series on the history of the Radical Faeries (Frontiers, Jan. 27, Feb. 24,
2009; Frontiers in L.A., Mar. 25, 2009) where the only passing reference to Mitch or his
contributions was that he was a marginal player who got into an argument one day with
Harry and left, when in fact Mitch was in an ongoing intimate friendship with Harry
from which had sprung the Faerie movement to begin with two years before Don was
even brought in to help organize, and Mitch was throughout those early years a fully-
involved member of the core organizing circle with Harry, Don and a small handful of
others, in actuality until Mitch and Don in concert together publically resigned from the
founding group in the summer of 1981.

This dispute over the gay past is not at all a mere matter of ego personalities or petty
priorities. As Don’s historical revisions kept showing up, I became increasingly upset
about what looked like a concerted effort on his part to badly distort how it seemed to
me the Faerie movement came together and operated early on, and in the course of that
malicious re-editing to officially eliminate Mitch’s ongoing and crucial participation,
contributions and ideas from the record while covertly benefitting from many of them. I
personally care very deeply about gay history and what the Radical Faerie movement
was founded to explore, and in particular about the psychologically-oriented approach
to gay liberation Mitch has cultivated over many years starting from even before the
Radical Faeries, for which I accord him much respect in demonstrating such a dedicated
perseverance in that neglected and very needful direction, as I have been inspired
thereby to in turn devote my own life to also putting into better emancipatory practice
some of the powerfully-useful conceptions he has forged, such as the formulation of gay-
centered inner work, which refers to the enfranchising activist effort to become valuably
gayer through homosexual self-awakening psychological means, what amounts to a
profoundly-spiritual subjective quest that I believe takes us marvelously beyond any
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current gay liberational consciousness, moves us innovationally into the gay psyche’s
more depthful contradictions and infinite alchemical possibilities, and because of that,
into a new kind of interpersonal and community politics as well. So for Don to in
essence erase Mitch from the historical record, it seems to me, is really about getting rid
of the crucial ideas and practices Mitch stands for and that he brought to the Faeries and
our community generally, while replacing all this with Don’s watered-down, uncredited
versions deceptively framed in a bowdlerized activist history, to which, as you can see, I
am having a very strong reaction.

After Don’s first article on the Faeries appeared in January 2009, along with an
announcement that he would soon give a public presentation in L.A. on the subject, it
became apparent to me that a rare opportunity was being provided to bring some
powerful issues out into the public sphere more openly in an unusually-specific way, so
on that appreciative basis I then wholeheartedly participated in planning and attending
the subsequent demonstration against Don and Mark’s presentation, and also wrote an
associated statement wherein I described in particular how my personal experiences
with Don over the past 30 years had helped inform and shape my current understanding
of gay-centered psychological theory and practice (see “Chris Kilbourne’s Protest
Statement,” in this blog’s March 2009 archive).

At the Protest Event

One of the demonstrators’ basic intentions was to educate those who would be attending
the One Archives presentation as well as others who might hear of the event, that there
was another and importantly contrary perspective to Don Kilhefner’s on the Radical
Faeries’ origin, history and purpose, particularly in terms of what it means to be gay
today—and that this other view, associated with Mitch Walker, concerns the sense of a
gay-centering moral imperative about deepening same-sex-loving psychological
integrity through taking better cognizant responsibility for the personal gay unconscious
as the next activist step of greatest significance in the worthy actualizational project of
coherently seeking the best possible homosexual emancipation, practically and
spiritually. And what better way to express and illustrate the progressive ideas of this
contrary and otherwise unmentioned position on Faerie history than through applying
them in a public setting, analytically, to the actual historical situation and personalities
involved in the current controversy while the “official” version mutilationally unfolded
inside the One Archives hall?

For me, it was a little scary going to a public activist event where we had no idea how we
might be received, but as it turned out, about two dozen people responded to our call to
protest Don’s manipulative whitewashing of Radical Faerie history and the powerful
ideological struggles invoked in and over that story, and almost everyone entering the
building appeared to be receptive to, curious about or at least tolerant of what we were
trying to do there. Most took our handouts, which included a substantial statement by
longtime gay activist and organizer Wendell Jones, my own pronouncement and a
collective explanation of our protest group’s mission (see “Wendell Jones’ Protest
Statement,” “Chris Kilbourne’s Protest Statement” and “Original Protest Statement”
respectively in the March 2009 archives of this blog). Only one person arriving that I
was aware of was openly critical, saying as he passed us, “eating our own again, are we?”
It seems to me that question should have been more appropriately directed to Don and
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Mark. On the other hand, another entering fellow was quite excited to meet “the one
who threw the fruit salad” (see my previous statement), telling me that as a young Faerie
he had experienced Harry Hay as so dominating towards him that for a long time he was
badly turned-off altogether by the Radical Faeries and wouldn’t have minded throwing
something himself at the time.

Some people, once most of the audience was inside the Archives building, were
apparently distracted or perhaps disturbed by our enthusiastic presence, singing,
dancing and chanting as we were on the sidewalk out front, because soon enough the
open door of the building in the direction facing the demonstration was firmly closed.
Although no one in attendance directly confronted those of us outside, I found out later
that during the question and answer period, when a protester who had gone within
angrily raised his voice in response to Mark’s and Don’s dissatisfying answers to his
equitably-put question as to why the two of them were in such key ways leaving Mitch
Walker out of their presentation on Radical Faerie history, some audience members
expressed their annoyance with the question by clapping when Don answered with a
dismissive cliché: he, Don, was merely stating his own “truth” about what had happened
historically, while others also have a right to “their truth” as well, and anyway, he didn’t
see where there was any problem to begin with. It developed into a bit of a heated
exchange between Don and the demonstrator (captured on video; see “Schism in
Faerieland, Parts I-III” in this blog’s April 2009 archive) that the One Archives
President, Joseph Hawkins, then stopped by offering our protest group an equivalent
opportunity to present our position on Faerie history at a later date (which did occur in
November of 2009).

I had wondered how Don and Mark would handle our action and its themes that day at
the Archives, and I have since learned by listening to an audio recording of their entire
presentation, that, for example, Don, as expected, never even mentioned that in reality,
after an initial “honeymoon” period, he began to experience painfully increasing
difficulty relating to Harry during the early Radical Faerie days due to Harry having a
strongly-domineering personality, nor did he say anything about how he’d come to learn
from Mitch back then to view this vexing problem with a gay psychological
understanding. Neither did he talk about the negative implications for the Radical
Faeries that importantly-activated, psychologically-based troubles occurring in the
foundational organizing circle, most notably around the big problem with a bullying
Harry, were never adequately addressed, and that he, Don, became quite aware of and
involved exactly with these very concerns to the culminating extent of publically
resigning from the original circle together with Mitch in notable protest against Harry’s
persistent refusal to take any adequate responsibility for his rampant acting out of his
own dark psychology, particularly as the leading figure of the movement, and how it was
that this refusal was poisonously contaminating otherwise-auspicious Faerie organizing
efforts through Harry’s subsequently unchecked need to continue selfishly controlling
and dominating activist situations he was in, a badly-compromising arrangement which
was making it ethically unbearable for Don to continue being fraternally involved at all
with Harry as he didn’t want to continue contributing to what he had risibly come to all-
too-clearly recognize as a disgustingly-hypocritical charade.

As I mentioned, I was once close friends and colleagues with both Don and the other
presenter that protest day at the Archives, Mark Thompson, separately and together, for
 5

many years (as well as with Harry to a lesser extent), and even though I have not
substantially related to either one in awhile now, I am sure Don and Mark knew very
well why we were demonstrating against their fraudulence that Sunday, so their craven
avoidance of the dark side of the Radical Faerie scene in their rose-colored presentation
was particularly impressive although consistent, given the extra challenge to stubbornly
ignore the pressing situational message of our persistent chanting outside, as both Don
and Mark then blithely proceeded to do. Only when they were more directly confronted
during the Q&A period by one of the demonstrators who had gone inside, did they at all
address the matter, with Don saying he didn’t understand then and he didn’t
understand now what the ruckus was all about, and Mark then piously backing him up.
It’s very hard for me to see how Don’s answer can be anything but baldly disingenuous,
given that he was once deeply and extendedly engaged himself in that same kind of
“ruckus,” i.e., those key tactical matters involving effective exposure of the disturbing
gay unconscious that Mitch introduced him to during their years of close comradeship.
There are many old letters Mitch has from Don that I have seen which clearly show Don
at the time coming to understand these gay psychodynamic and interpersonal affairs
quite well (see “Doug Sadownick’s Statement, Part I” in this blog).

Overall, I think we demonstrators responsibly mounted a valuable public event

thoughtfully aimed to fairly express seriously important ideas otherwise being
manipulatively erased and passive-aggressively attacked inside the hall we were
standing in front of. I expected some people would be disturbed, even though we didn’t
disrupt anything. Arguably, our presence actually spiced things up into a more
meaningful experience for all involved, and provided a depth of historical context that
otherwise would have been completely and detrimentally absent. And besides, some
disturbance has a necessary part in the journey of gay-self realization anyway.
Complacency resulting from sufficient achievement of prior developmental steps, a
common trap, is always the enemy of any better change, particularly pro-homosexual
change emerging out of a vicious heterosexist historical context still influentially
possessing an awful lot of noxious cultural momentum.

And speaking of which, after that Sunday at the One Archives, the Don Kilhefner faction
was not about to let our colorful and thoughtful educational demonstration go by
without subsequently raising the ante.

Karen’s Frontiers in L.A. News Article

Within just a few days of the protest, journalist and news editor of Frontiers in L.A.,
Karen Ocamb, was able to get an article by her published in that week’s issue (March 8,
2009) reporting on Don and Mark’s presentation as having been “marred” by the
demonstration. She focused on “a handful of audience members [having] accused Dr.
Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson of ‘erasing’ therapist Mitch Walker from history,”
and singled out “therapist Dr. Doug Sadownick of the LGBT specialization in clinical
psychology at Antioch University in Los Angeles” as the only named protester. In the
next paragraph she described Don’s presentation, contrary to the demonstrators’ alleged
accusation, as having included Mitch in its account of Radical Faerie history,
contradicting the protesters’ apparent position, and thereby suggestively impugning
them as having acted in bad faith, actually, with malicious intent. The article ends with
“During the Q&A, several of the protesters who were in the audience of about 100
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angrily shouted at Kilhefner before ONE said they would host a talk featuring Walker.”
From Karen’s writing, it’s not clear why the protesters “angrily shouted” at Don. If their
problem was so minor that it only involved whether one relatively-unknown individual
was misrepresented in the distant history of some obscure organization, it would then
seem that those demonstrating were indeed eccentric, cultish, even crazy. On the other
hand, that some people mustered the will to speak out against Don and Mark’s
implacable and meanspirited manipulativeness could suggest that something more
important might have been occurring there than mere partisan or infantile acting out,
something actually key to the whole matter that seems to have never even entered the
reporter’s supposedly conscientious mind to even slightly consider.

Karen’s reductionistic handling of our complaint about “erasing” Mitch, subtly

enhanced by her careful rendering of Don’s and Doug’s professional degrees but
omitting that Mitch Walker is just as much a “Doctor” as the other two, implying a lesser
status, manipulatively encourages a fundamental misperception that this disagreement
is about some kind of petty personality struggle or revenge act by disgruntled factional
malcontents. Karen could have at least mentioned our actual concern, which she did not
in her news report, that Don’s minimizing or trivializing (more technically accurate than
“erasing”) of Mitch’s importance in the formation of the Radical Faeries really points to
a deeper problem that potentially affects all gay and lesbian people: how the
unconscious gay psyche is not now and was not back then in forming the Faerie
movement being sufficiently addressed and how that failure to adequately confront and
struggle to better resolve the inevitable psychological scarring incurred by all gay people
who must grow up in a violent heterosexist world, detrimentally affected what happened
with the Faeries and continues to so affect each gay person and the community at large
to this day. It is this deeper problem, the seemingly intractable but polluting difficulty of
that persistent gay psychology related to what Jungians call the shadow, the morally-
dark and rejected side of the conscious ego personality, that our protest group charges is
irresponsibly misaddressed by Don in his public work overall, not just when talking
about Radical Faerie history. Regarding this complaint, Don’s presentation at the One
Archives event indeed, for all intents and purposes, did “erase” Mitch’s important
contributions and ideas, including those about the liberational problem of the gay
shadow and its gay-centered activist confrontation, which, for a period of time, Don had
deeply respected, admired and followed, as can be seen in his many caring and detailed
letters to Mitch from the early years of their longtime activist collaboration.

In her news article, it would seem that Karen intended through the avoidance of any
adequate contextualizing, among other sly maneuvers, to deligitimate the protesters, to
make them appear merely unreasonable, immature or worse, and, in this noxious vein,
that of the dissidents there she would publicly name only Doug along with his
professional livelihood in association with her smeared rendering suggests a
particularly-vengeful intention to connect Doug detrimentally with unbecoming, even
unprofessional, behavior, an immoral assault on him I will return to towards the end of
this discussion.

Beginning to Look at Karen’s Blog Commentary

At the end of her Frontiers in L.A. article about the demonstration is a link to a blog
posting where Karen declares herself free even of pretending to maintain journalistic
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standards. She writes, “So thank god for blogs! I've had an itch to tell a particular story
for some time now—but because I'm personally involved, it never seemed
appropriate....” Evidently it’s OK now, as she then proceeds to scurrilously discredit me
and my friends, focusing her most extensive mal-attention again on Doug.

It’s interesting to note here for the purpose of contextually integrating the various facets
of the larger matter presently under discussion, that Karen’s malign animus against
Doug somewhat parallels the even more-involved situation between Don and Mitch,
where, like Karen did for so many years with Doug in an even more passive-aggressive
way (see Doug’s blog statement herein), Don has sought to minimize, denigrate and
outright disappear Mitch, a good previous friend, when possible due to what I believe
was and is Don’s intimately defensively-held resentment in particular due to Mitch’s
queerly-persistent confrontational approach within gay activist contexts to more
effectively dealing in as direct a way as possible with the ubiquitous problem of peoples’
unremitting and irresponsible acting-out of hidden shadow issues, when this included
Don himself personally. That is, I believe Don had something very disturbing in his own
psyche which implacably needed protective hiding when it was high time for that
otherwise very-secretive area to itself be fairly honestly accounted for interpersonally in
the principled gay psychological context Mitch and Don were attempting to
liberationally establish, a fiercely inappropriate, regressive attitude of deep and mean
insincerity which it seems to me has firmly held Don in its malignant grip til today.
Karen similarly persistently sought to covertly oppose and erase Doug in all ways
possible after he apparently tried to confront Karen in late 1993 on what he felt was her
unconscious acting-out of her internalized homophobia on the dying Michael Callen,
their mutual friend.

In her Frontiers in L.A. news article, as can be seen, Karen betrays her own ethical
standard, that of being able “to tell someone else's story as truthfully and as
unencumbered by ego as possible,” because a problematic bias prevents her from in any
way fairly conveying the viewpoint of the protesters. In her blog commentary she does
quote and then address several excerpts from the Original Protest Statement (which had
before the event been emailed to her along with the other two protest documents cited
above, among various other figures in the community), but she cites only ideational
fragments that make it relatively easy for her to then mockingly discredit them. For
example, she pulls out two paragraphs from that Statement discussing the endemic
ethical failure situationally entailed for the Radical Faerie movement historically when
destructive unconscious issues would get interpersonally acted out irresponsibly and
self-defeatingly in Faerie organizing and at consequent events with the tacit approval of
the collective, to which Karen, as if swatting a fly, derisively quips, “Huh? He goes on
about ‘the shadow’ as if everyone knows what the hell he's talking about.” Here Karen
shows off a sort of “know-nothing” disdain for the moral and political notion of
sufficiently learning to take fair responsibility for one’s own subjective psychological
problems otherwise maliciously active interpersonally, as the vitally-necessary
transformative ingredient in effectively seeking better gay liberation individually and
collectively, which has been Mitch’s basic activist message for several decades now. In
her thoughtless mocking of the hard work entailed in responsibly owning the gay
shadow personally, organizationally and community-wise, not to mention the ethical
imperative thereto, Karen takes up a strong reactionary leadership role that implicitly
upholds gay psychological irresponsibility.
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Karen’s View of Me and My Friends

In her blog commentary, Karen focuses on Doug to a great extent, then Mitch and
Wendell. I am mentioned by name only once, as being a “member of Mitch’s clan,” who
along with Mitch and Doug, had given Mark Thompson “trouble” some years back. I am
curious as to why she never refers to my own protest statement (sent to her along with
the other documents cited above) where I present very personal and quite intimate,
experientially-based knowledge of Don’s compromising behavior to which I apply a gay-
centered psychological analysis, an understanding, by the way, which I also apply to my
own life as well. Could it be that she couldn’t find a way to dispute the embarrassing
truthfulness of what I wrote about Don and Harry Hay as well, so she just ignored it?

What she does claim is that I, along with the rest of a “small group,” a “little band of
followers,” “cult-like” (according to Don Kilhefner), so violent (according to Mark
Thompson) that we will “come after your dogs”—“were viciously attacking” Harry Hay
and had “inundated” Mark “with nasty letters attacking his character and stuffed [them]
in his mailbox at home and in mailboxes at” the graduate school he was attending at the
time. Also according to her, at a store signing event for a new book by Mark, we ex-
friends of his “shouted shadow questions that left Mark so frightened, he and Malcolm
were hastily snuck out the back by Betty Berzon and Terry De Crescenzo.” She adds that
we “had so terrorized Mark that he refused to do any publicity for ‘Gay Body’—and that
essentially killed his book career,” showing that we were and are a more malign social
threat than just “some jerks making nuisances of themselves.” Finally, after thoroughly
invalidating us personally and our demonstration conceptually and morally, she ends
her statement by summarily calling us “perennially petulant Peter Pans who seem to
delight in tearing down others—in the name of therapy.”

In all this Karen makes it seem, as she had in her news article, as if I and my friends
were obscure interlopers or disgruntled minor players in Harry’s, Don’s and Mark’s
activist careers and lives, our controversial actions nothing but mean and idiosyncratic
perpetrations on innocent movement heroes, when actually the story is quite different in
so many basic ways, as I have begun to enumerate and as I will now endeavor to
highlight more of in terms of my own personal experience.

History as I’ve Lived It

Speaking of my own experience, let me share with you here that, as I write this, I have to
struggle deeply with how my own violent psychological issues want to affectively poison
my ability to write functionally, by for example critically questioning whether some
incompetent like me should even try to compose anything at all. I’m now feeling
frightened that those aggressive forces still subjectively active will trap me in some
mind-fuck way such that I will wind up being a violent hypocrite whatever I do manage
to say. Now I feel disoriented and dazed because I want to express myself sanely and in
respect to Gay Spirit yet instead get more bogged down in fuming toxic shame about my
own inferior shadow self, no longer at all able to effectively address Karen’s attack on its
merits. At this point I want to be open and non-defensive with what Karen (or Don or
Mark) might critically see in me, yet then it could easily become all about my struggles
with my own ugly features. I now sense the humiliating pull of that badly-wounded kid I
once was, who crushingly experienced terrible rejection because I couldn’t conform to
impossible and endless standards of social uniformity and straightness imposed by my
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family and others. Here I would like to restitutively describe how I ongoingly work with
these shadow issues of mine, and that I have thus so proceeded for the last 30 years, and
yet I’m then afraid I will still be harshly judged for failing to resolve all my own
unfinished family business and infantile trauma during this seemingly-ample time. On
the other hand, one would hope that, after twelve years of my own personal therapy as
well as ongoing journaling, meditation, self-processing and confrontation by my activist
friends, I have indeed made some progress in my effective responsibility for and self-
healing of my own psychological violence, although it is of course an ongoing
developmental struggle for me as for anyone trying to take better care on this personal
moral level, which can only be an endeavor pursued but never entirely completed, as we
are all imperfect mortal beings.

With that revealing acknowledgement of the ongoing reality of my own personal

psychology in mind, I would certainly like to note here that integrating my inner
contradictory hostility rather than acting it out irresponsibly myself, is a most seriously
respected, ongoing challenge and development for me personally. It is apparent to me
that back in the historical situations I am referencing here, I was considerably less
related to and accordingly more easily tempted to defensively project out my own
unintegrated aggressive impulses, lending a certain credence to criticisms of some of my
more intense interpersonal and group actions at those times as about me being to some
extent irresponsibly mean or unduly forceful. However, I would maintain that even
when that was indeed the case, it does not nor can it ever justify or excuse any other
involved party’s own unwarranted violence.

That’s enough attention to my shadow for the moment in this discussion, because I do
want to return to Karen’s blog statement. Here I would like to more specifically show
how the provocative behaviors of me and my friends that Karen finds so dastardly were
not actually of a foul nature or intention, but rather were justly undertaken and caringly
guided by a reputable Jungian psychological notion attemptedly appreciated in an
activist homosexual manner, the principled idea of honestly and fully confronting the
obstructionist gay shadow intra- and interpersonally, which is, then, in essence about
sincerely trying to better constructively address the more difficult maneuverings of gay
psychological defenses and resistances within ourselves and, where possible, with each
other and in the community. Don and Mark were both fully active in efforting that
challenging psychological forefront as a gay liberationist ideal for some years, but as
described above, conflicts arose and so I would like to go more into how those conflicts,
here in particular with Mark, developed and finally erupted out into a more public
sphere, that sphere which then included the protest against Don and Mark’s 2009 One
Archives event. I hope that looking additionally at my own experience and
understanding of the persons and situations involved can shed further light on what has
been and is going on regarding pertinent claims of historical factuality as well as the
related psychological and political issues.

Overlooked in Karen’s mutilated history, it was actually Mitch’s ongoing relationship

with Harry, as described by Stuart Timmons in his book, The Trouble with Harry Hay
(1990), that formed the core of what then soon enough became the Radical Faerie
movement after they first met in 1976. Instead following Don’s more recent lead, Karen
portrays Mitch as a mere historical footnote of no lasting presence or importance. And
where Karen makes it seem that those of us now associated with Mitch’s ideas were ill-
 10

willed troublemakers, as I’ve mentioned, it’s actually the case that both Don and Mark
were for a long while themselves devoted fans of the particular approaches Mitch
innovated, and of particular note here, Mitch’s gay activist tactical use of modulated
confrontational maneuvers as legitimate methods for at times appropriately addressing
badly acted-out feelings and other rampantly-unrestrained psychological issues
oppressively operating interpersonally and in group organizational settings. Mitch first
introduced in the early Radical Faerie context the since-then slowly-gathering impetus
to more directly address the ongoing pernicious problem of the repressed gay
unconscious, of the lingering, internalized homophobic effects from a millennium’s
worth of vicious sociocultural stigmatization and murderous scapegoating, as an
essential activist factor in best realizing liberatory Gay Spirit, and since then he has
worked continuously to help bring about a more-embodied gay fulfillment of
contemporary homosexual sacredness that he strongly feels could not be seriously better
realized without such difficult ongoing confrontation with those otherwise hidden,
aggressive, defended-against, inferior-feeling parts of the personal same-sex-loving
psyche, the gay shadow. Thus, where Harry is considered to have contributed to the
modern gay movement through his ongoing organizing prowess and ideas, and Don can
be seen to be an important local gay community organizer, and as Mark is notable as a
significant gay editor and writer, so too Mitch can rightfully be regarded as the
originator of gay-centered psychology, the comprehension and psychotherapy of
subjectivity from a homosexual point of view, an arguably vitally-necessary ingredient in
the more beneficent development of better-enhanced gay freedom, consciousness, spirit
and soul today and into the future.

Moreover, Mitch most certainly, and I, Doug and Wendell Jones to lesser and varying
degrees, were close, at times very close, with both Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson,
as well as with Harry Hay. We were all of us deeply mindful of and committed to the
long-term work of justly attaining the fullest gay liberation. Thus, the ongoing political
community involvement of the demonstration organizers, while controversial at times,
has been anything but minor or meaningless. With that reasonably-appreciative
sensibility in mind, I would like to go into how some of the incidents Karen badly slants
to concoct such a negative picture of those who had protested Don and Mark’s talk, will
be seen in a very different light when fair-mindedly contextualized within the larger
unfolding history topically entailed, and in this statement most pertinently how that gay
history was experienced through my own personal participation.

Let me tell you more about that. I first met Mitch Walker right before the initial Radical
Faerie gathering, which I did not attend it, and I soon thereafter met Mark, who was
then Mitch’s good friend. I had just turned 21 when on July 1, 1979, Mitch moved into
the apartment right above mine in Berkeley, California. I was coming out and pretty
confused about many things, although I felt a strong passion for seeking meaningful
sense of the world. I had been an undergraduate student of architecture at U.C.
Berkeley, but had dropped out at the beginning of that academic year after an agonizing
two terms due to a growing experience of utter alienation from the school’s big-money
orientation and the pretentious and entitled attitude it expected. I had become so
disillusioned with the direction I was then headed in that I took a big risk by instead
becoming a street artist to support myself financially. It was not an easy choice, yet by
the time I met Mitch, I was beginning to make a successful living at it, and as such I now
fancied myself something of an up-and-coming baby bohemian, an open-minded
 11

denizen of new cultural and political possibilities who was accordingly ripe for, though it
took me some months to intelligibly begin relating to, Mitch’s unusual gay ideas and
queerful presence. Still, it wasn’t long before I started to become his friend and to see
the world more clearly through what Harry called the “gay window,” and that fey
perspectival formulation then started to make fascinatingly constructive sense to me,
especially as I began to venture more consciously, under Mitch’s warm encouragement,
into the living subjective world within my own gay mind.

Soon I became very eager to more actively participate in the Radical Faerie scene, and I
met Don and Harry probably in early 1980. As well as enthusiastically attending the
second national gathering that August in Colorado, I had previously begun in San
Francisco facilitating Gay Voices and Visions workshops, a group format Don had put
together encompassing a multi-week reading and discussion series on pioneers of gay-
centered thought. I became increasingly involved with the main Faerie organizers while
attending many, many local Radical Faerie meetings and gatherings, mainly in the San
Francisco area, during the subsequent early years of Faerie organizing. I helped
generate understanding and interest in the ideas of Harry, Mitch and Don, which was
probably a useful contribution to the movement as a great number of the Radical Faeries
in the U.S. turned out to live in the S.F. Bay area. I also remember organizing a
particularly striking Faerie group there called “Primeval Slime,” from a quote by Harry
Hay (“The term ‘spiritual’ represents the accumulation of all experiential consciousness
from the division of the first cells in the primeval slime, down through all biological-
political-social evolution to your and to my latest insights through Gay Consciousness
just a moment ago.”—from “A Call to Gay Brothers” printed on the first Faerie gathering
flyer). This innovative “Slime” group of five or so Faeries focused on confronting the gay
shadow as a ritual initiation into better-engaged Gay Spirit, and probably met for a year
before I then moved to L.A. in 1983 to become more involved with Treeroots, the non-
profit corporation Mitch and Don had formed after they resigned from the original
Radical Faerie organization in protest against Harry’s anti-psychological attitude.

Given my pretty extensive and loving connections with Don and Mark, which I will
recount more of below, it is remarkable to me that things could historically have evolved
in such a divisive way that Karen Ocamb, someone entirely innocent of the original
events, could come along to now paint me, Mitch and others as “delight[ing] in tearing
down” Don and Mark, and could further be particularly offended that we would dare to
challenge the latter two when they had merely been worthily “advocating the spiritual
and psychological exploration of gay identity,” and when all of us had at one time been
the seemingly greatest of trusting comrades and friends.

Now, what even Don and Mark used to agree was healthy discourse, is considered by
them and their supporters to be reprehensibly unacceptable.

Karen seems upset by those of us who sometimes employ direct confrontation as a

political tactic to psychologically engage a deeper and more sincere discussion, and yet
she is apparently unaware that Don and Mark, as I have pointed out, were themselves
for many years deeply respectful of and influenced by Mitch’s use of that same type of
provocative method in strong advocacy for the better determination of gay subjective
truths in activist interpersonal contexts, even when that might inevitably entail
disturbing or unapproving defensive reactions, particularly when such truths involve
 12

better homosexual sensibilities or resisted-against psychological actualities. Why would

Don and Mark now want to disguise or hide the fact that each at one time highly
appreciated, at least conceptually, the initiatory, empowering potential inherent in
strong gay self-expression sometimes necessitating even powerful public confrontation
to more seriously expose and then effectively grapple with the roots of homosexual
interpersonal aggression, with the awfully repressed, resisted and entrenched parts of
the damaged gay unconscious, for the long-sought emancipatory sake of better-
actualized same-sex-loving personhood?

I would like to investigate here a little more the way in which confrontation has been an
important theoretical and practical issue in the unfolding history of thematic political
dialectics involving gay-centered psychological activism and Harry, Don, Mitch, Mark,
myself and others. But because I’ve already written some about my involvement with
Harry and Don in my first statement, I would now like to focus more on Mark and how
things grew to be so publicly confrontational with him, and how he is very far from
being any kind of victim in the pertinent matters Karen refers to in her blog statement.

My Further Organizing Efforts

As noted above, I moved to Los Angeles in 1983 to continue and deepen my Treeroots
activism, and right away I began co-facilitating the new multi-week workshop
experience called “Gay Soul Making, Dreamworld Descent of the Hero Shaman,” which
combined readings and discussion on gay-centered thinkers and Jungian thought with
practical psychological engagement. The workshop was a synthesis of Don’s previous
study group and Mitch’s emphasis on more directly addressing the gay psyche through
methods like dreamwork and active imagination. I was a board member of Treeroots
and co-facilitated variations of that workshop for years with Don, Mitch and others,
including Mark on occasion. Mark had moved to L.A. from San Francisco not long after
I did and he also became quite involved with Treeroots as a board member, corporate
officer and activist participant, which presence he maintained for many years.

In addition to our Treeroots endeavors, all of us remained involved to some extent over
the years with the Radical Faerie movement. In early 1984 Don, Mitch and myself
helped organize a local Radical Faerie group, “Star Circle,” to put on a regional week-
long gathering which turned out to be quite successful operationally and qualitatively.
At this event, Mitch talked prominently about ways in which the psychological shadow
could be a serious problem during Faerie convocations, for example in terms of how
certain people were missionarily going around at the gathering saying that being a
Radical Faerie sincerely enough would magically bless a person so he wouldn’t have to
worry about HIV transmission through unsafe sex, with this dangerously-risky message
and resultant behavior being entirely tolerated by almost everyone there and even
encouraged by some. As the gathering proceeded at a remote location east of San Diego,
and which was attended by probably 100-150 gay men, some became quite upset with
me as well as Mitch for persistently publicly engaging individual and group shadow
dynamics, including our own, and for attempting to upfrontly demonstrate in a gay-
centering manner that we all have psychological defenses and issues which, if not more
directly addressed, always orchestrate destructive and usually covert forms of
interpersonal collusion and coercion.
 13

The Star Circle event became known afterwards in some quarters as the “Shadow
Gathering,” and while most participants seemed to have had a positive and valuable
experience, a few others were so negatively charged by what Mitch and I were trying to
broach there on the novel frontier of gay psychological politics, due, it seems to me, to
the strong challenge this bold new stance presented to their own paranoid needs to
aggressively dominate, manipulate and control others, that these disgruntled
malefactors then started agitating to “ban” us from future gatherings, a sort of counter-
psychological position that then festered in the local Faerie scene for years. That
meanspirited impulse to get rid of a now-demonized enemy on the part of a polarized
and vocal Faerie minority served to further validate a political sort of “shadow fascism,”
or the viciously-controlling domination of defensive acting-out unconsciously exerted
through covert group collusion, which was unfortunately strongly alive at that time and
previously in the overall Faerie community as I knew it during those years (as well as in
society generally). As I see it, no homosexual person can escape being psychologically
infused with the repressive and destructive ugliness of badly-aggressive shadow
business in particular because we gay folk are all crushed but still-living products of that
cruelly-toxic heterosexist society which Mitch and I had been trying to counteractionally
challenge by attemptedly outing the difficult problem of vigorously-defended-against
gay shadow at the Star Circle event and further by morally insisting that Radical Faeries
take better responsibility for the consequent violence towards themselves and each
other destructively enacted by this problematic gay subjectivity when insufficiently
attended to.

This is not to say that my own personal shadow business should not also be at issue in
the historical discussion here undertaken. In that regard, I can feel how a part of me gets
off in a suspiciously-infantile fashion on being provocative, pushy and even outrageous,
if not dramatic, and I certainly was at that Faerie gathering! It’s an impulse which is
perhaps modeled after my maternal grandfather’s emotionally aggressive, though
creatively noteworthy, show biz persona. I think in this important respect I somewhat
follow after him (besides his being a dramatic old Hollywood queen I lived with early on
as a child) in that he was known to have some very dark impulses, and yet he could do
some very good things, like the screenplay to The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 film for which
he, Noel Langley, received the main credit. Looking back at my actions in the matters of
Faerie history I am here exploring, I think when faced with other peoples’ intense
hostility, I may have been provoked at times to myself become overly aggressive in some
of the unfair and bullying ways that I also saw Harry Hay in addition to my grandfather
enact quite often, and knowing of the damaging results consequent to these other two
men misusing their power and authority, I can understand how that contradictory
aspect of my own behavior could have itself contributed destructively to the strong
polarization of the scene and of the anti-psychological Faerie faction particularly (as well
as perhaps furthering the confusion of the large majority in between the factions at that
time), and I now certainly regret my relative immaturity in participatory regard to the
situation back then. Yet I feel that, no matter my own aggressive irresponsibility in
contribution to the historical conflict among the Faeries I am here relating, because it
was then the case (and still is now) that I was sincerely working (and had been doing so
for years) to better address my own dark shadow stuff and persistently attempt to work
it through responsibly, whatever acting out of my psychology which may have been
occurring pales next to the massive degrees of vicious, even at times frenzied, hatred
and vituperation I would personally experience from the uglier of the anti-psychological
 14

Faeries and that I would observe in their terrible attempts at the worst sorts of
interpersonal manipulative machinations, rumor-mongering, collusions, ostracizing,
etc., and in no way could my own personal psychology have been the cause of their dark
psychological business or of the hypocritical forms of controlling group-mindedness
consequent to this mucky business traditionally having an ongoing free hand that were
cumulatively threatening to regressively turn Faerie gatherings into increasingly
trivializing playgrounds.

I raise here for the second time in this discussion the matter of my own psychological
culpability in difficult interpersonal situations unfolding historically in order to
consistently express the spirit of my living struggle to be as sincere as possible with my
own shadow material, that I am a three-dimensional human being also, thus so risking
this frank exposure here as I try to stand up authentically for an important new ethical
and political principle centrally involving the enhanced freedom of fuller gay subjective
truth. As much as a part of me doesn’t approve, I know it is ultimately good for me to
face my own psychology openly as I try to address other people’s equivalent business,
accordingly showing up in an important way what a gross hypocrisy existed among the
Radical Faeries back then and among Don, Mark and Karen now, where, on the one
hand, people would (and do) hold forth ideals of gay freedom, equality, openness and
loving inclusiveness, and yet would quickly hypocritically take it all back and instead
nastily attack those fellows that a controlling few found offensive or disagreed with
when interpersonal emotional and psychological honesty was truly at vulnerable
personal stake. Don, by the way, as I recall only came to perhaps a couple of the initial
organizing meetings for the Star Circle Shadow Gathering, and otherwise didn’t really
participate, not even attending the gathering itself because (as I understand it) he didn’t
like how generally unconscious he anticipated that the scene amongst the Faeries was
still going to be. That he would much later come to write a series of articles on Faerie
history in which he makes it seem as if he had had no negative feelings or problems
about all this is, again, a most remarkable sleight of hand.

The Mark Thompson I Knew and “Loved”

I don’t remember Mark being involved at all with that 1984 Star Circle gathering,
although in the ’90s he co-organized a widely-announced series of S/M Faerie-like
events called “Black Leather Wings,” in the first of which Mitch was also involved. My
only more-direct experience of this latter endeavor concerned my then-close
companion, Felipe, who attended either the second or third of those S/M gatherings and
got mixed up with a young woman who thought it would be a good idea to use her knife
to make several long rows of rather severe and badly scarring cuts across his chest as
some kind of initiation, into what was unknown. I was not happy about it when Felipe
returned. My life back then as well as now was dedicated to the realization of more
psychologically conscious homosexual personhood, and from that gay-centering stance,
it seemed to me that Felipe had been badly seduced by his psychic defenses into
hurtfully acting out against the sacredness of his own homosexual nature. That the
“initiation” was done in unsanitary conditions, causing a painful infection, only served
to underscore the very real dangers posed potentially by what seemed to be a gay man’s
provoked yet unaddressed mother issues difficultly resident in his shadow psychology.
In retrospect, it makes sense that this violent enactment had mal-appropriately occurred
under the supervisory oversight of master Mark, head organizer, since, not a couple of
 15

years later, he was himself to become embroiled in an HIV infection scandal that he
avoided responsibility for appropriately addressing by resigning from Treeroots and
cutting off all contact with his long-time friends in gay-centered inner work, a messy
drama that has also been documented elsewhere in this blog and that I will explore
more of shortly.

During the later 1980s I returned to school in psychology and became licensed in 1991
as a Marriage and Family Therapist. I worked as a counselor in a couple of substance
abuse rehabs, I was a children’s social worker for the county, and then I became a
clinician at a public high school-based health clinic where I saw individuals and families,
supervised trainees and pioneered groups for abuse issues in general as well as for LGBT
youth specifically. I slowly built up a private psychotherapy practice which grew to full-
time by the end of the ’90s. During this period as well, I continued facilitating gay soul-
making groups almost continuously through Treeroots and also began therein to
develop a collegial activist relationship with Doug Sadownick.

During the early ’90s, Don resigned from Treeroots and I became closer to Mark. At that
time I moved to Silver Lake from Hollywood, not too far from where Mark lived with his
partner, Episcopal priest Malcolm Boyd, and we started to visit each other fairly
regularly. Soon after my move, there was a small gathering of gay men at Mark’s house
where I read a paper I wrote critiquing author Robert Hopcke’s gay Jungian analysis of
the film, The Wizard of Oz, in his 1989 book, Jung, Jungians and Homosexuality (This
was also one of the first times I encountered Doug). I argued that rather than
understanding the movie’s story the way Hopcke did, in terms of an asexual integration
of a gay man’s authenticity regarding gender values and the persona, it made more sense
to see this tale as most pertinently about adolescent sexual awakening, in which case
Dorothy could represent the feminine aspect of the gay guy’s ego in search of a
masculine soul, here symbolized by the phallic power of the broom and the mysterious
wisdom of the wizard. Such an interpretation of gender and what Jungians call “soul” or
romantic love, unlike Hopcke’s idea of a “male anima” figure (which appears in his 1990
book, Men’s Dreams, Men’s Healing), was more in line with that better integration of
gay liberation and Jungian thought seen in Mitch’s post-Jungian theoretical
understanding of gay male love, first formulated in the later ’80s, as developmentally
arising from out of a symbolic “Uranian complex,” wherein the young gay boy
unconsciously falls into incestuous longing for his father and accordingly regards his
mother as both a competitor and a role model (see Mitch’s 2009 book, Gay Liberation
at a Psychological Crossroads).

There was another Treeroots meeting at Mark’s home during this period, which
Malcolm also attended, at which we explored sponsoring a conference on gay
spirituality. It was proposed that the event be inclusive of non-gay-centered religious
groups and supporters (like Malcolm), which I strongly opposed. Consequently the
conference idea fell through, and this may have been the last effort in which Don was
involved with the rest of us. I suspect Don didn’t like my critical position on
inclusiveness, which was perhaps a contributing factor in his decision to finally resign
from the corporation, though I’ll probably never know for sure because he has up til now
not explained any of his relevant reasons, motives or feelings in any way I am aware of.
Don has never, to my recollection, communicated directly to myself or anyone else I
know anything about why he departed Treeroots after more than a decade’s
 16

participation as its co-founder, at that time disengaging all practical connections with
his long-time associates, or about any opinions he had concerning this seismic move,
Mitch, me or what we were doing, even though he had seemed for a long period quite
supportive of Mitch’s ideas. As discussed above, he later was to behave as if Mitch did
not exist, while incorporating into his own more-recent projects and philosophy various
of Mitch’s major ideas and practices (such as being a gay community psychologist,
shaman and Jungian), without crediting him in the slightest.

As for Mark’s partner, Malcolm Boyd, I ran into him fairly regularly over the years I am
here relating, though I didn’t interact with him much beyond polite pleasantries. I could
not at first understand what someone like Mark saw in him. Admittedly, Malcolm had
been prominently involved in the African-American civil rights movement of the ’60s,
and caused a notable stir when he publically came out as a gay Anglican priest in the
’70s, but he was still deeply and faithfully involved in the Christian religion, an
institution inextricably associated with at least a thousand years of vituperative
homophobic oppression, and which I found absolutely repulsive. Malcolm was also a
good 20 years older than Mark, and he acted like it—Mark had a perky, S/M “bad boy”
streak and Malcolm was a disembodied bore. Mark complained to me not a few times
about the torment he suffered sleeping in the same bed with someone to whom he felt
no erotic connection. What they did have in common was a cozy bourgeois attitude of
comfortable “hipness” and persona-driven “sincerity” that I found ultimately distasteful,
but which I guiltily overlooked while I shared indulgent social afternoons drinking wine
and eating pleasant lunches while lounging with Mark in his hot tub.

Mark occasionally would make wry sexual comments to me suggesting he could be open
to some kind of physical intimacy, and yet we both mostly kept our distance in that
regard. Emotionally, though, our fondness for each other seemed to deepen.
Among many gifts of his affection over the years, Mark once gave me a 20-gallon rose
plant full of beautiful white blooms for my garden, as well as not being shy about
professing his ongoing love for me more directly. For my part, I had felt deeply
saddened and cried copiously when I first heard that Mark had seroconverted to HIV-
positive back in the earlier ’90s. But in retrospect, I’m not sure exactly how close we
really became given that after not too long he would so completely and coldly turn his
back on me. Actually, it appeared fairly easy for Mark to tell me he loved me, and I came
to express my love for him too, though for my part, I couldn’t clarify if the awkwardness
I felt about it was due to my own internalized homophobia or was a reaction to some
unresolved unconscious issue I sensed in him but couldn’t get at more directly, as it
always seemed like his apparent emotional authenticity came with a subtle limit, an
underlying quality of interpersonal impersonalness or unreachable distancing that
cautionarily signaled deeper, more disturbing and unaddressed matters.

Aside from the occasional nude encounters we had in his hot tub, one time, though, we
did engage in some very light sex-play with each other and Felipe. Mark tied me up and
gently whipped me. I don’t know why he was so careful with me. Even though I acted
like it was enjoyable, there really wasn’t much to it. I regret that back then I wasn’t
psychologically strong enough to have more openly addressed my concerns and feelings
with him in that scene or even more generally. I think at the time I rather liked the idea
of trying to get closer to him even if it wasn’t very deeply satisfying due probably to the
 17

problematic aspects of his character I mentioned above in combination with my own

emotional limitations back then.

Although I had remained pretty active in the L.A. Radical Faerie scene into and through
the ’90s, Mark stayed only peripherally engaged. However, he was very busy with Black
Leather Wings during much of this period. He found the regular Faeries too “vanilla” for
his S/M tastes, but he did become more directly involved with the overall Faerie
community in 1995 when he contributed a short essay to an issue of the local Radical
Faerie journal, Faerie Dish Rag (FDR), which a group of activists including myself
produced to address the problem of the gay shadow in the L.A. Faerie scene at that time.
If I may digress for a bit about this latter situation due to its narrative relevance, our
activist Faerie group called itself Star Circle, but it was now a collective which had been
forced to split off from the heretofore-main organizing group that had been sponsoring
gatherings in the area for a decade. This organizational split erupted in 1994 after a
particularly-disastrous regional gathering, referred to more extensively by Wendell in
one of his blog pieces (see “Wendell Jones’s Response to Karen Ocamb—Part I,” March
2009 archives). That ruinous event, in a wet, remote and dangerously-cold winter
environment, had been set up and controlled by a rogue faction of conspiratorial Faeries
who hijacked the organizing process and were vocal opponents of directly addressing
the psychological ways individuals and groups can behave violently and thus
hypocritically, particularly when high ideals are involved like with the Radical Faeries. It
was tragically poignant to me that the resulting gathering (which I did attend) turned
out to be such a disaster, as it rained heavily and then literally froze at the location site,
forcing most of the paltry participants to miserably abandon ship. It might be added for
history’s sake, that arguably the most successful Faerie gathering in the Los Angeles
area was the one just prior to the winter fiasco. This previous event took place in Malibu
in 1993 and there the organizers had been more so dealing with the shadow, if some of
them reluctantly, because Wendell and I were fully engaged throughout and we both
pushed persistently for common-sense structures and conceptualizations to
progressively address Faerie psychology and the gay shadow that were incorporated in
the planning and organization. Clearly, there wound up being a few activists involved in
this Malibu convocation who were as usual furious that their hidden agendas for
exploitative domination were again being thwarted. Some of these persistently ill-willed
schemers were the following year then able to take tactical advantage of my own need
for a recuperative break and Wendell’s simultaneous distraction because of his close
friend’s dying from AIDS to mis-organize that year’s big event. And it was as Wendell
then became increasingly more vocal about this exploitational faction’s violent neglect of
serious health concerns starting from before the gathering, that subsequently they
vengefully responded by clandestinely producing an issue of the local FDR, which had
previously been collectively published by all of us involved Faeries, using that abducted
issue as a forum for vicious lies and ugly slander against the pro-psychological Faeries,
not unlike what Karen Ocamb was to do fifteen years later in her blog.

We who had been attacked, wholeheartedly joined by Mark Thompson, cohered more
tightly as an activist group in the face of this fierce onslaught, and in response we put
out a counter-issue of the FDR that challenged the aggressors back by confronting not
only their outrageous hypocrisy but our own shadow feelings and issues as well. This
clarified group of psychologically minded Faeries then went on to meet monthly for the
next several years at my house in Silver Lake, and that Star Circle group soon evolved
 18

into the latest incarnation of the “Primeval Slime” Faerie circle from the early ’80s, but
now it was more psychologically sophisticated, there were more participants, up to 20
people, and it could be very intense. In this experimental effort, folks were bravely
trying to open up to, constructively provoke and honestly explore their deeper hurt-rage,
shameful primitive psychological trauma, all the taboo stuff of the archetypally-
darkened gay shadow, to better learn about and work to integrate it more healthfully,
progressively and spiritually, for the sake of becoming increasingly empowered and
effective as meaningful homosexual men, in consequence practically seeking together a
new dimensionality of gay liberation experience through interactively undertaking
group ritual forms of provocative psychological initiation mutually. As an integral
participant who came to virtually all of those monthly meetings for at least a couple
years, Mark knew very well about the importance of gay shadow confrontation, and was
actively engaged throughout in the group process, which included much fierce
directness, though his struggle to more fully access the better-embodied depths of his
own awful hurt-rage and toxic shame was evidently always terribly difficult for him and
sometimes painful for me to witness due to his childhood trauma having been, as he has
indicated in some of his writings, particularly brutally tormenting.

It was with members of this fresh activist incarnation of the Radical Faerie Star Circle
that Mark led small S/M workshop events in the Los Angeles area, and it was within this
sub-cultural milieu that one of these workshop participants in the spring of 1997, while
consistently having tested negative for the prior several years, suddenly found himself
infected with HIV after several particularly-bloody fisting scenes with Mark, who was
openly known as HIV-positive. And it was within this progressive association of gay
men, unusually devoted to facing the challenge of gay-centered inner work, that Mark
then suddenly turned his back on his commitment to the principles which underlie that
endeavor, and along with those principles, his long-time friends and colleagues. I will
examine these disturbing events in more detail in the following section.

Master Mark and His Unaddressed Violence

As I just indicated, those of us who had been regularly meeting monthly in Star Circle
also became involved to varying degrees in Mark’s S/M efforts of the time. Among his
diverse such activities, Mark developed a local pet project separate from Black Leather
Wings that was intended to be an initiatory experience for gay men desiring to better
deal with psychological trauma in their bodies through invoking carefully-orchestrated
“daddy”-“boy” scenarios. Mark fancied himself a “master” in such matters based on his
many years’ experience going back to the S/M community in San Francisco (he also
edited the book Leatherfolk [1991]). In Los Angeles, he convened regular workshop
“scenes” with up to a half-dozen or so guys from the Star Circle group and others whom
he would help open up to very intense somatic feeling states.

I think in many ways this was an admirably-bold experiment. Mark, following the new
gay activist direction forged by Mitch Walker, became seriously interested in bringing
the Jungian appreciation of the shadow to Harry Hay’s uplifting vision of gay valuation
in a constructive S/M context. He agreed with Mitch that actively addressing the gay
shadow was critically important in the justly-fulfilling effort to more progressively
actualize good Gay Spirit, and he wanted to exploratorily focus on the terribly-powerful
remnants of childhood homophobic trauma somatically as well as through attending to
 19

how the gay boy’s problematic relationship with his father specifically gets activated in
S/M play, thereby aiming to more effectively embody and work through these inner gay
difficulties to accordingly liberate homosexual libido into fresher and greater
possibilities for valuable self-realization, also ideas Mitch was enthusiastically
espousing.

It turned out, unfortunately, that Mark’s mastery had its dark limits, which were
revealingly reached when the terrible series of incidents started to unfold around him
that I briefly summarized above. First, one regular participant in his L.A. workshop
series became infected with HIV, which back then could still amount to a medical death
sentence, so it was a really big deal, and on serious reflection it then became rationally
evident to this person that Mark was the likely infector. I wasn’t personally involved in
any of the events at question, so I don’t know first-hand what actually happened, but
according to the person involved (and other witnesses I have heard from), he on
multiple occasions engaged in very messy and mutual “ass-play” interactions exclusively
with Mark. As I see it, no matter the literal particulars involved for him, Mark as
workshop leader should have been able to persistently struggle to address everyone’s
feelings and needs (or get the appropriate help) so as to reach for some type of relational
reconciliation and relative affective resolution as to what was going on psychologically
and factually in terms of the problem presented by the HIV seroconversion of the
workshop participant. All of us in our Star Circle inner-work group, including the
seroconverter, had been committed to persistently confronting subjective concerns, and
it was naturally expected that in his own handling of the crisis, Mark would continue to
be thus so devoted. Such attitudinal fellowship was one of the key components in the
cutting-edge liberation project of gay-centered inner work we had at this point engaged
in together for years, an activist theory, practice and dedication which had developed
out of the failure among the Radical Faeries organizationally to take adequate
responsibility for the gay shadow problem.

But instead, shockingly, Mark rejected any reasonable recognition of his own possible
literal and psychological parts in the unfolding fiasco, and after one meeting with the
unhappy seroconverter that apparently displayed this closed-minded attitude, he
refused to deal with the matter any further, leaving the other fellow feeling coldly
rebuffed and badly unsatisfied. Then, in an even more disturbing turn, Mark suddenly
and unilaterally shut off any communication at all with any of us inner-work friends,
and instead of relating proceeded to start defaming and demonizing the rest of us as an
evil cult. Evidently he was accusing us of abusively persecuting him in vengeful reaction
to his simply wanting to innocently leave the group, as I first heard of from Wendell
when he told me about his and Mark’s last conversation together, where apparently
Mark talked seriously as if he was the victim in this whole situation! And then, even
more provocatively on his part, and equally galling to the rest of us, he continued to
make public appearances representing himself as a worthy gay community and S/M
leader while acting as if there was absolutely no controversy going on, about which I’ll
highlight more of below.

Since Mark had always seemed fully supportive and was often heavily engaged in our
mutual liberational activities, it was shocking for me, then, both personally and as a
fellow activist, when he so dramatically betrayed that long worthy effort and our
apparently-good friendship. Well, maybe not entirely shocking, for in retrospect I can
 20

see that, as I alluded to before, Mark, for all his evident commitment to facing his
psychological issues, always exhibited a certain guarded, emotional distance in how he
communicated about what was inside of him, and outside the group he did all too easily
adopt an affected sort of smarmy, bourgeois social-etiquette persona that struck me as
distinctly unprogressive. It really wasn’t unexpected to recognize, even though it was
painful, then, that Mark could have acted as if everything was sincerely fine for so many
years between us, working closely with me and Mitch and the others, seemingly deeply
devoted to the serious investigation of gay psyche, and then when the chips were truly
down that he could so suddenly and coldly abandon this brave work and turn brutally on
us previously quite-close colleagues.

Mark’s quick reversal and thorough betrayal, which also involved a fairly significant
change in his character and basic demeanor from what I could tell, strongly implicates
the powerful psychological defense called splitting, it seems to me, and as such points to
a fairly serious, unaddressed problem in his basic personal psychology provoked by an
otherwise-intolerable current stressor. I believe it had been a limitation all along for
Mark that even when he tried he could not really be sufficiently sincere or authentic in
his working relations with his fellow organizers or with anybody, actually, regarding
more intimate levels of disturbing and difficult feelings he might have been experiencing
(or that others were experiencing), and that in the end when these more dangerous
subjective levels were strongly enough instigated in the context of his gay-centered inner
work efforts and associations, through the threatening revelation of long-hidden
dysfunctional consequences of those more-defended levels, he then misguidedly
attempted to handle the consequent overwhelming affective threat of unbearable
personal shame and humiliation defensively, reactionarily, by scapegoating his inner-
work associates, by projectively imbuing us with his own scary and unresolved, infantile
hatred and other internally-frightening shadow material now dangerously stirred up,
instead of taking fair and accurate responsibility for these unwanted self-aspects as
would be ethically expected. And worse, the more Mark’s inner-work friends responded
to his attitudinal reversal by caringly trying to constructively engage him about it, the
more he acted out his violent projections by claiming we were thereby viciously
attacking him. Now, in conspiring with Don Kilhefner to speak on the Radical Faeries in
a freshly-whitewashing way (as I heard from the tape recording of the One Archives
Faerie presentation) which makes it seem as if he had none of the history I am here
relating, no critique of Faerie hypocrisy, no involvement in intensive gay-centered
shadow work, no big problem over his questionable leadership behavior, Mark further
provokes those of us he has already meanspiritedly betrayed so thoroughly. Such
persistently-nefarious behavior interpretively suggests psychologically a repetitious
enactment of past emotional trauma painfully disowned and instead mis-attributed to
projected-on others previously cared about, thereby compulsively playing out an ancient
abuse pattern of embittering betrayal through the covert arranging of pertinent
unfolding situations over and over again.

Of course, one would reasonably have to anticipate that there must be an aspect of risk
realistically involved in any seriously-challenging endeavor, such as what I and my
fellow gay activists were bravely attempting to do psychologically both with ourselves
and with others. That is, if we stand for confronting malicious psychological
defensiveness in the community we may well get attacked back in a difficult or
damaging fashion, and if we engage in an intimate group process powerfully provocative
 21

of objectionable psychological material, someone or something could go too far or too

fast therein and how is that then handled. This was the question of appropriate
responsibility powerfully raised in our group by the charged situation that dramatically
developed between Mark and the rest of Star Circle, and here I want to clearly indicate
that most of us involved participants tried to be sensitive and responsive all along to the
dangers in what we were attempting by our radical process together, to do the best we
could to ongoingly appreciate and account for that riskiness, and to endeavor to handle
any difficult developments regarding ourselves and each other nevertheless arising as
conscientiously, judiciously and prudently as possible within the ethical context that we
were freely-consenting adults in purely voluntary association. When his own behaviors
of a more egregious nature were appropriately questioned by the rest of us in that
dedicated context, Mark quickly betrayed any such caring attitude toward the group
process and utterly failed to help keep the ethically-necessary dialogue going.

As Mark continued to act openly in the guise of unquestioned authority and guide while
aggressively spurning his former close friends in a cowardly manner that mocked the
gay psychological morality he had previously seemingly espoused, all for the sake of
irresponsibly avoiding a requisite obligation that could have just as well been adequately
addressed, several concerned people eventually felt a moral duty to speak up more
openly about what was going on. In particular, the workshop participant who became
HIV-positive decided in May 1998, a year after the incident first exploded, to compose a
public letter to Mark. Here is what he said:

I am writing this letter to formally and clearly state my belief that I know
of no one beside you who could have infected me with HIV. Any
reluctance on my part to name this fact in the past has been simply a
matter of my own denial, shock, and fear, which I have been able to work
through over the past year. Your total avoidance of me and complete
disavowal of the real consequences of our risky and largely unconscious
sexual acting out only firmed up any doubt I harbored about the source of
my infection.

I have been far too passive and polite with you. I am ashamed of my
cowardice. I have been co-dependently protecting you from my outrage
toward you. Your loud and sensationalizing protests about the way that
you are being harassed and victimized by your friends-turned-cult over
this past year have grown intolerable to me. I feel that my own silence
around your gross dismissal of my need to process with you my pain, loss,
and anger about my HIV infection, specifically my belief that you infected
me, has indirectly enabled you to tout yourself as a victim. I fully expect
you to continue your spineless whining, but at least with my position
more clear, your protestations can now be put in their proper
psychological context.

My assertion that you infected me is based on the humiliating,

unfortunate, but nonetheless true consequences of our sexual activity
(1993-95). I believe that you infected me during one or more of our ass
raping episodes which involved profuse bleeding from wounding to your
own ass and mine. We shared the same sling which would become
 22

covered with blood, ass slime and contaminated lube. We significantly

impaired our judgment through using alcohol, pot, and, on one occasion,
“xtc.” I have thoroughly reviewed all other possible sources of infection in
the time period between a year before my last negative test result and my
HIV diagnosis. There is no other feasible occasion within which I might
have become infected.

We increased the risk of our sexual acting out by never discussing the
real possibility of your infecting me through reciprocal fisting scenes. I
was afraid to speak to you about me feelings. I felt intimidated by you
and shamed for being “oversensitive” or “paranoid.” You seemed
uncomfortable speaking about the real threat that your HIV posed to
me, and in general, you encouraged and enforced only the most
superficial feeling life between us. Nonetheless, you treated me as if you
were introducing me to a “sacred” experience. You presented yourself as
a mentor and “daddy” to me. I literally put myself in your hands.

During the time that we were sexually and emotionally relating I did not
feel empowered to speak up to you. It is here in my decimated sense of
self and inability to gauge the danger of our unsafe sex that my
“borderline” traits gave you an advantage over me. I would suggest that
my belief in the likelihood that you infected me is not a symptom of my
“borderline personality” as you have obnoxiously said to others. While
you have much experience cavorting with borderlines, you have little
insight into the actual matter. My memory is not impaired. I do not
have hallucinations. I am not delusional. We have many witnesses to
several occasions of our dangerous sexual scenes. Many people saw the
copious blood and felt that something was seriously frightening about
our activity. That no one had more of an ability to intervene is cause for
concern and reflects an overall lack of consciousness in our group at
that time.

My continued struggle with my woundedness shows up in my inability

over the past year to have had enough of a sense of self to stand behind
my beliefs about the riskiness of our past sex acts, and my masochistic
propensity to have secretly carried the burden of this information in
dire fear of falsely accusing you and risking the loss of your love, such as
it is.

Imagine for a moment that you were capable of empathy and that my
seven years of intensive inner work have actually offered me an
appreciation of reality. Imagine that you really did infect me through
unsafe sex and that I had to watch you systematically deny all contact
with me. And finally, imagine that I had to watch you portray yourself as
a victim being harassed by a cult consisting of gay men, myself included,
who insist that you stop dodging the consequences of your actions.

Your refusal to take any responsibility for the murderously unsafe sex
we had together is painful and feels like an enormous betrayal to me. In
 23

this act of refusal you have undermined any integrity that had existed in
our work together. This last year has been utter hell for me. My anxiety
around becoming sick, the meds, their side effects, uncertainty of the
future—all of that—has been exhausting and overwhelming. You have
demonstrated not one moment of true empathy for me around this
experience. You are not a leader around gay soul making. You are an
imposter, a big fat murderous faker. You had the opportunity to mourn
with me our stupidity and unconsciousness, to accept your part with
some dignity. But you have lost that chance and instead have chosen to
attack your friends and drag yourself down in the process.

Until you come to your senses, if ever, you pose an actual threat to any
psyche or body who unwittingly puts her or himself in your emotional
or physical care. I feel that it is my obligation to help name your shadow
as needed in an effort to keep your frantic and violent behavior to a
minimum.

Other people have also had seriously-challenging ethical experiences with Mark, though
few have been willing to openly discuss these often-sticky matters, let alone publicly
present such concerns. Another person who had some in-depth experience for some
years with Mark and his S/M associates also eventually got up the courage to write him
a letter, and here I’ll quote from my copy of what also was intended as a public
statement:

This letter will document and amplify my public protest of your

appearance [riding on the back of a convertible] in the Gay Pride Parade
in West Hollywood on June 28, 1998.

I felt compelled to speak out on Gay Pride Day because you were yet
again portraying yourself as a community leader when you have
consistently refused to take responsibility for your own unconscious
violence against other gay people.
...
After all the pain that you have caused in our community, how could
you find the audacity to literally parade yourself as a leader? When gay
people are desperate for psychological healing and true leadership, you
offer instead a puffed-up charade of celebrity.

It is tragic that you appear to hate your own gay soul. But it is
outrageous that in your self-hatred you have acted out against me and
others in life-threatening ways. Your behavior reeks of terrible,
corrosive homophobia that you have consistently refused to
acknowledge. That is why I called you HOMOPHOBIC at the Gay Pride
Parade.

There are far too many examples of your homophobia to name in one
letter, but I will describe those I know best from my personal experience
with you. Our relationship began when I paid to participate in several of
your leather-sex workshops. Therefore, a student/teacher relationship
 24

was established the first day we met. You advertised yourself as a

teacher of spiritually oriented sex play, and I paid you to fulfill that role.
At the time, I was very much dominated by my own internalized
homophobia, which made me vulnerable to your unconscious violence.

For the many workshops that you taught, you repeatedly failed to create
safe containers that should support authentic exploration of gay soul.
This was particularly true for the six-day Dark Eros workshop you lead
in August 1994. One of your assistant teachers, Michael Dane, was
utterly identified with his own sadism, and took no responsibility for its
harmful manifestations. On the first night of the workshop, he forced
me to suck his cock blindfolded, and then shamed me when I asked him
to wear a condom. When I sought your support after this incident, you
encouraged me to speak with the man myself, but did nothing as a
leader of the workshop to discipline him. You could not see the real
danger that this pathological individual posed to myself and others, and
the extent to which his presence during the event caused a constant
rupture in the container. In retrospect, I see that your inclusion of
Michael Dane as a teacher at the Dark Eros workshop was a reflection of
your own lethal homophobia and destructive power.

Although you spoke frequently about the importance of psychological

awareness for spiritually based leather sex, you were rarely able to
express or partner your own feelings when relating to me directly, and
actually avoided my awkward attempts to be authentic. One memorable
example was an intense scene where you whipped me until I was welted
and sobbing. Instead of fully processing the painful feelings that had
come up, you initiated an old-fashioned make-out scene, seeming to
comfort me when in fact you were suffocating both of us with your
vampirism.

During the winter and spring of 1996, you and I participated in a

monthly S/M gathering at Winston Wilde’s house. After our first few
meetings, you admitted to me that you were concerned about Winston’s
irresponsible aggressive behavior, but you did nothing to protect me
from his abuse, which you witnessed on several occasions. Winston
repeatedly acted out his anger toward me by putting me into physically
challenging positions without any prior negotiation. In one notable
instance for which you were present, Winston prevented me from
breathing when I was already bound and gagged, making it extremely
difficult for me to communicate an end to the scene. To control my very
breath when he was not in control of his own anger was an outrageous
violation of my being. You remained uninvolved, but my own body was
far more sensitive, responding with a traumatic, nine-day episode of
hiccups during which I could barely eat or sleep – and coughed up
blood. The hiccups became so severe I had trouble breathing and was
rushed to an emergency room. This was a clear sign to me that
something was terribly wrong with our gathering, but my subsequent
expression of fear and confusion to both you and Winston produced no
 25

change in the harmful dynamics between us. Rather than provide any
sort of leadership, you continue to enable Winston’s aggression. You
were present on repeated occasions when Winston put his cock in my
mouth with no condom, when you knew that he had never been tested
for HIV. I accept responsibility for the way in which my self-hatred
allowed me to participate in this life-threatening behavior. I am
simultaneously enraged that, because of your own deep self-hatred, you
did nothing to interrupt the pattern of abuse.

Several times over the past year and a half I have asked you to discuss
these issues, but on every occasion, you have stalled and put me off,
avoiding any acknowledgement of your personal responsibility. You
have written and published books describing gay shadow, but when you
are faced with the extent of your own, you claim innocence and attempt
to silence anyone who dares to name it.

I am disgusted by your numerous attempts to defame many individuals

in the gay-centered inner work community. Although there have been
repeated requests and opportunities over the past year and a half for
authentic dialogue, you have instead chosen to spread damaging rumors
about your former friends. In doing so, you have successfully distracted
attention from the real issue, which is your inability to take
responsibility for the harm you have caused others.
...
Because you have failed to take any responsibility for your behavior with
myself and other members of the gay community, I have found it
necessary to express myself publicly around these issues.
...
For my own integrity, it has been essential to communicate my
experience to you and all others who read this letter.

I, Chris Kilbourne, also felt a lot of hurt and anger; I think anyone who had been as
personally close to Mark as I was and as some others were as well, would experience a
similar sense of betrayal, and anyone else who was depending on him as a leader of a
politically-important gay liberation effort, as were those he had been mentoring, should
also reasonably have been quite disturbed. Many of us tried to express our reactions in
different ways and for some months following eruption of the HIV infection imbroglio.

After this discordant episode had begun to spin out so dramatically, there was a
coincidentally-scheduled reading at a local store for Mark’s new book, Gay Body:
Journey Through Shadow to Self (1997), in which he attempted to show, using his own
life story, how important it is for a gay man to face his dark psychological issues and
feelings. Many of us considered it important to be in attendance at this reading, that if
Mark was going to continue irresponsibly misleading others as he had been doing, it was
incumbent upon those who so-well knew better to at least attemptedly confront this
hypocritical behavior, especially given that he kept taking on a mantle of leadership,
here as the great editor and writer of important books on gay life and spiritual matters,
and otherwise, who else might be ensnared in some possibly-harmful way? It was
 26

particularly disgusting to me that his new volume was directly inspired and influenced
by the gay-centered inner work he was now betraying.

At the reading I listened to Mark who, in a rather weak voice, nervously shared
innocuous selections from his book while pretending there was nothing else going on.
He made himself appear fragile and pitiable, far from the rather intense persona, the
strong figure, that I was familiar with from our public work together. It seemed to me
this wounded demeanor was purposefully assumed to manipulate his supporters and
others into sympathetically seeing him as the vulnerable victim, with his ex-friends in
the audience thus being contrastingly highlighted as the would-be assaultive aggressors.
Now set up to play out this misleading story, Mark’s betrayed colleagues could easily
become demonizeable and scapegoatable if anything untoward happened there.

Still, in spite of that set-up, I felt my truth had a right to be heard at the book event,
because I personally found Mark’s extraordinary disingenuousness in that moment
grotesquely offensive morally and a brazen public display of irresponsibility intolerably
despicable, as he was implicitly blaming innocent others for his own destructive gay
shadow and its prior bad choices of the sort I have been relating. In other words, I
became incensed, and finally, after what seemed to be interminable patience on my part,
I couldn’t stand it anymore, I could no longer remain silent for the sake of protocol or
etiquette. And so I did the unthinkable and interrupted, asking in a firmly-
conversational tone, “Mark, what about the shadow?” He ignored me and kept reading,
though now somewhat flustered. After another long wait, I then said a few times, not all
that loudly, in a sort of spooky-sounding voice (it is untrue that anyone screamed at him
as Karen Ocamb proclaims in her blog commentary), “the shadow, the shadow, the
shadow.”

As I was assessing it, Mark’s whole presentation was itself a contemptible insult to the
valuable ideas his book was supposed to be espousing, and consequently I felt pressed
by my conscience to attempt rectifying what seemed like a terrible wrong in what he was
doing and in the audience’s seemingly-blind assent thereto, as that repulsive situation
implicated me through the background imbroglio behind the event’s special moral
meaningfulness, or that I should at least point out there was a big ethical problem
manifesting in the room, as a way to handle myself at a duteously-answerable
crossroads (is that not an embodiment of “journey through shadow to self”?). Then,
after I began to speak up for the second time, some people, Mark’s supporters,—or more
aptly, his protectors, enablers and accomplices—became predictably hostile. Malcolm,
who was sitting in front of me, soon whipped around and, uncharacteristically, rather
maniacally started screaming at me, repeatedly, to “shut up.” It was fascinating to
witness someone I knew as an emotionally pretty vacant, mild-mannered, doddering old
man suddenly transform, bright purple-red, spittle spraying from his gaping mouth,
abundantly overflowing with a lively viciousness and black vehemence that could only
be the sincere manifestation of the very devil himself of Malcolm’s own repressed
Christian shadow. I’d never seen him as animated and numinous than in those few
moments, and felt deeply honored to have had an invocational part in so vividly
exposing that supposedly-virtuous man’s otherwise quite hidden and very, very ugly
violence. The security guard at the bookstore, now seeming like the stolid embodiment
of repressive, controlling judgmentalness, then tried to intimidate me into leaving, but I
resisted, saying I had done nothing except exercise my free speech rights. Community
 27

activist Teresa De Crescenzo and her partner, psychologist Betty Berzon, close friends of
Mark and Malcolm, were looming above us at one point yelling, trying to shame, mainly,
Doug, who was sitting next to me, and accusing him of exploiting Mark’s special
occasion to gain publicity. Terry was angry but also seemed confused and asked at one
point what we meant by the shadow. Among the answers Doug and I gave her, I
suggested that it had something to do with how for her the youth agency she founded
and oversaw (the now defunct Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services) could have
gotten embroiled in an ugly legal drama over allegations of child abuse not too long
before this bookstore event. That seemed to take her aback. And meanwhile Mark, amid
all the ruckus, in cowardly fashion soon enough simply ducked out the back door, an
entirely unnecessary exit that Karen Ocamb, his new enabler, conveniently twists in her
blog statement into a desperate escape from persecutory hounding by loony fanatics.

The dramatic extent of Mark’s egregious personal and political betrayal in his attempts
at that book reading in 1997 to portray himself as both victim and leader, was like
pouring more salt in the wound for the rest of us ex-associates sitting there. It was
simply dehumanizationally outrageous. I and likeminded others had only the rare
opportunity to give voice in broader ways to our appropriate outrage about what was
going on ethically during that period, while Mark was busily employing his and
Malcolm’s large networks of professional and social friendships cultivated over years to
spread ugly and cruel slanders intended to make sure we would be given no credence. In
her blog commentary, Karen makes it seem as if we were just meanly harassing or
almost stalking Mark. This is a very nasty distortion meant to distractingly reverse the
actual power situation going on. Mark is the bad-faith provocateur. He is a very skilled
political animal, having honed his abilities over decades in the oftentimes cut-throat
worlds of gay publishing, journalism and cultural society through the dark arts of
passive-aggressive demonizing, interpersonal collusion, manipulative schmoozing and
so on. I expect that by outlining what actually transpired in some of these important
historical situations which Karen’s account misleadingly covers where I have personal
knowledge, it can perhaps serve as a counterbalance to Mark’s political expertise
(among other factors) in weighing currently controversial matters like just what should
appropriately constitute relevant gay history or a progressive gay community ethics
today.

Mark was in no fashion any sort of innocent bystander irrationally stalked by malevolent
“thugs” in all this, as Karen makes it maliciously appear in her vituperative discussion.
By framing it that way she is, in my opinion, parroting Mark’s later, simplistically face-
saving, demonizing-of-your-accusers spin on what had actually transpired. In reality,
Mark, apparently having given up on being psychologically minded in the face of his
successive leadership failures now culpably exposed, instead flip-floppingly resorted to
the sleazy tactics of his own not-long-ago-denounced, anti-psychological opponents in
order to attemptedly handle his colleagues’ increasing upset with what was alarmingly
coming to be more clearly revealed as a toxic and destructive incompetence previously
defensively well-disguised, one such underhanded maneuver by Mark being the
vociferous and persistent reputational tarring of any messengers of embarrassingly
revealing information by way of vile gossip and character assassination, as I heard from
third parties over and over again that he was privately doing after he dissociated from
the rest of us. In this ethical light, it was first of all his personal failure to responsibly
and fairly continue his commitment to his own gay-centered psychological work in the
 28

face of challenging inner material vigorously stirred up, and then his nasty defensive
behaviors in consequence, that caused Mark’s problem with the rest of us. His initial
cowardly mistake was only morally compounded by his resulting smear attacks against
his former comrades, amounting to outrageously disgusting displays of hypocritically
homophobic slander and scapegoating deception, particularly notable expressions of
moral cowardice coming as they did from this previous, long-term, seemingly warm
friend and self-promoted admirer of gay liberation ideals (he edited the book Long Road
to Freedom [1994]), a sickening revanchist mockery that is only additionally engorged
by then enlisting gullible people like Karen Ocamb to now eagerly do more such dirty
smear work publicly.

Other Encounters with Mark Thompson

It is my understanding that at least one copy of one of the public letters about Mark’s
egregious behavior I cited before was left in Mark’s mailbox at his house at the time, but
other than that and an initial period of attempted phone calls after his break with us, no
one associated with our group that I am aware of ever contemplated approaching Mark’s
home much less actually harassing him, unlike what Karen says in her blog, although we
certainly upfrontly challenged him and culpable remaining associates of his on their
hypocrisy when there was fair public opportunity, which was the only way Mark had left
us to be able to effectively communicate with him about what we felt were more than
legitimate concerns.

I did confront one of Mark’s S/M cohort, Winston Wilde, fairly regularly for a short
period of time when I would run into him spontaneously at my gym. I would talk out
loud with Winston nearby while doing sit-ups, loud enough for others in the small work-
out room to hear, about his own instances of bad-faith collusion with Mark in acting out
violent behaviors that I was aware of, and his cowardliness for avoiding taking any
responsibility for these distasteful matters. He finally “told on me,” as if he were the
victim of his unethical behavior. The gym owner ordered us both to his office and
listened to our clashing stories, then said to tone it down. Yet the owner from then on
seemed less sympathetic to Winston, who I think tried to avoid me more effectively after
that.

Another example of “public opportunity” had to do with the fact that Mark was at this
time attending graduate school in psychology at Antioch University Los Angeles, and the
person who’d written the second public letter to Mark I quoted above, who was also a
student in that program at the time, used a flier for a non-school workshop Winston was
conducting that had been dispersed all over the school featuring a testimonial quote
from Mark praising Winston’s abilities, where things had then been re-arranged to
become agitprop in such a way as to expose both Mark’s and Winston’s outrageous
shadow behaviors and concordant irresponsibility, and that altered flyer was then also
dispersed at the school.

In regard to another such activist situation, Doug and a now-deceased colleague, Sandra
Golvin, were both in the same psychotherapist internship training program with Mark,
one year apart, at the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center, wherein they each felt morally
impelled after the big blow-up to engage in honestly confronting Mark rather than do
the usual persona politeness. One time, Sandra distributed a mock press release to all
 29

the interns and staff challenging Mark’s ongoing unethical behavior. Sandra also
challenged Mark in their mutual supervision group, as had Doug the year before her. It
was certainly controversial of them to insist that it was a new ethical imperative of gay
community responsibility for someone of Mark’s high-minded but ongoingly
hypocritical stance to be fairly confronted on such important moral grounds rather than
colluded with through assent-implying silence, yet of an aptly-relevant nature given that
Mark was in training to become a licensed professional clinician.

After all this roiling development unfolded in the later ’90s, things then calmed down,
with Mark seeming to lay low for a time, but gradually he has made more public
appearances again of a questionable nature until now openly teaming up with Don to
pour additional salt in the still-worsening wound of their accumulating ethical lapses.
These two fraudulent recreants are even going further in tandem than each has done
before in camouflagedly flaunting his shameless violence, brashly making freshly
outrageous, false and misleading claims regarding themselves, their activist lives and
the early history of the Radical Faerie movement. They unblinkingly mount these ill-
willed distortions in the widest public sphere they can and repeat them over and again,
as if they were apostles of lies who could testamentally make their twisted alterations
thereby stand the test of time. And perhaps they very well could, if we others didn’t
speak up about and write down our own experiences of what actually transpired. One
recent example of Don’s and Mark’s persistent and coordinated historical falsifying can
be found in the Summer 2009 issue of White Crane, in which they interviewed
themselves about the Faeries (likely wielding their power as board members of the
journal’s nonprofit publisher), allowing them to repeat Don’s dogma that he alone with
Harry started the movement. They also announced plans to have a national Radical
Faerie conference and publish a related book, which will no doubt boost their
murderously self-aggrandizing historical re-elevation further, a nasty revanchist project
connivingly pushed additionally in Mark’s new memoir, Advocate Days and Other
Stories (2009), where, following Don, a benignly-rendered Mark equitably exists in a
laundered autobiographical tale of the years I have been covering not only without any
of the dark history recounted in my discussion or even any mention of his two-decade,
deep activist relationship with Mitch Walker, but to top it all off, the last paragraph of
the book consists in a dedicated acknowledgement to the wonderful Don Kilhefner,
whose “courage, vision and persistent activism” have “encouraged” Mark during the past
three decades and now, presumably, during his unctuous rendering of an expurgated life
assiduously scrubbed clean like what Don has himself sleazily undertaken in self-
complimentary regard to his own sordid historical story, to the fulsome point that, as
Mark oleaginously proclaims in a ringing testament to the lush corruption of a well-
oiled mutual admiration society through the book’s final words, “I among many others
owe him boundless gratitude and praise.”

Returning to Karen’s Blog

That Karen in her blog commentary accuses us, Mark’s long-time close associates, of
unfairly attacking him and viciously destroying some career of his, and more so as if he
was a mere victim and indeed had been in any significant way “destroyed,” enacts a
typical example of powermongering reverse psychology. It is Mark, via his low-life
cheerleader, Karen, who by this twisted fashion continues his vicious attacks on those
who know something about his bad-faith failings. Just as abusively-unjust power always
 30

meanly blames the victim, Karen, as Mark’s spokesperson through her vicious
commentary, claims we who have been unfairly betrayed are almost-insane, community
destroying monsters. Yet it is she who foully corrupts her own power as a prominent gay
journalist and supposedly-rational discussant through her fawning iterative validation
of Don’s and Mark’s noxious manipulations. She almost gleefully compromises her
journalistic ethics as well as logical discourse by consistently failing to at all question her
one-sided sources or give any serious merit to the issues and ideas we protestors at Don
and Mark’s Faerie event were trying to address, instead cavalierly ridiculing and lazily
dismissing them. Her flippant attitude to such morally meaty gay matters only serves to
suggestively indicate the like regressive attitudes of her ideological patrons in this dark
affair, Mark and Don.

There has been a lot of hurt and outrage about Mark’s not only past but ongoing betrayal
felt by quite a few people with whom Mark was back then developing a powerful new
kind of same-sex-loving intimacy, a more-enlightened gay intersubjective closeness
comprehensionally rooted in the evolving consciousness of our liberation movement as
it has inevitably begun moving maturationally into what may be chronologically
understood as its next historical phase, a psychologically-focused stage, and thus more
tangibly into the dynamic realm of living gay psyche, where subjective existence is
sourced and out from which objective reality can be shaped anew. Mark had betrayed
much more than his personal relationships with the few other people around who were
and are bravely attempting to forge a new gay activism for an age of victorious
assimilationism, and who accordingly could use all the support we could get in that
cutting-edge effort, for it’s not in any way easy to so contrarily go against the ever more
vigorous current of the collective anti-psychological, hetero-centric zeitgeist as reflected
in presently popular notions such as “gay marriage” and “gay soldiers,” which foul pull
in my opinion is ultimately what is being paradoxically enabled by the double-dealing
likes of bad-faith Mark, Don and Karen, good gay chameleons that they are.

Unlike such two-faced betrayers, some other gay people seem alternatively called upon
morally to try upsetting the repressive trajectory of socially-enforced psychic violence by
instead speaking the discomfiting truth about better liberating gay psyche. For myself in
feeling pulled in that more healthful activist direction, I sense that impulse arising
ultimately from a vital Gay Spirit within which insistently seeks my full actualizational
emancipation homosexually, and that big freedom spirit persistently agitates in me the
eagerness and will to promote its better advancement in myself, others and in the world
overall. But then I can feel how that better attitude is then undermined by my own
internalized homophobic negativity, which tries to thwart or twist my enhanced well-
being emotively from within. I am quite familiar with how difficult and uncomfortable
the internal struggle to successfully partner intra-subjective violence and bad feeling can
be, and thus why most people would stay away from such an otherwise badly-needed
effort. Yet even as I can appreciate how the struggle to seriously self realize more
psychologically as gay is so challenging because of the painful gay shadow, it seems to
me that in the end there is no legitimate ethical excuse for avoiding this inevitable
growthful task, especially when one is seemingly a sincere espouser of lofty ideas about
progressive gay truth, love, spirit and soul like Don, Mark and now Karen suggest
themselves to be, and yet hypocritically attacks the only people who are seriously
grappling with the prospective psychological reality of Gay Spirit and soul individually
 31

and politically in persistent, disciplined and organized homosexual ways absolutely

nobody else I am remotely aware of is daring to even consider, much less undertake.

Karen’s Assault on Doug

Through her anti-protest efforts, Karen launched a particularly savage assault on Doug
Sadownick. Not only did she singularly smear him by name in her brief article that
appeared in Frontiers in which she wrote that our protest “marred” their presentation
(in her opinion perhaps, although for many others it was enhanced, made more lively
and interesting), but she really went to town on him in her blog commentary, in
particular accusing him of treating her quite meanly and selfishly over their mutual care
of Michael Callen, a well-known gay singer who died from AIDS in 1993, for which she—
as she freshly reveals here—has held a huge but heretofore covert grudge against him all
these years.

My relevant perspective on Doug, with whom I have worked closely in a mutual activist
context now for more than 15 years, is that obviously he has a shadow, as do I, but that
doesn’t make him an ogre like Karen portrays. I know he strives to be personally ethical
by psychologically confronting the inner violence of his own childhood trauma in a way
that is more dedicated and courageous than almost anyone else around, and has done so
for years. For example, I observe him to regularly publicly identify, take responsibility
for and attempt to better handle his own aggressive shadow material in a bravely-honest
manner that I find powerfully admirable and inspiring. In dramatic contrast, not once
does Karen own any of her own psychological issues or motives at all in anything I’ve
ever seen her write or heard her say in her entire career. Indeed, at one point in her blog
diatribe, she recalls at the time pondering for a bit whether there may have been any
possibility that Doug was on to something when he apparently told her that she was
acting out her unresolved family issues during their clash those many years ago, but
then she mindlessly dismisses the possibility simply out of hand, with a quick, clear and
resolute “no.” If I were the one being confronted with the prospect of such a serious
moral lapse, I would feel it important to consider the matter carefully and over time,
especially if it could involve my own subjective blind spots of internalized homophobia
and unintegrated violence. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that we are all flawed
mortals, and that others can sometimes see important things in us that we would
ourselves vociferously deny.

Furthermore, I know that Doug has long considered actively taking up better
psychological responsibility to be a profoundly-important political act. Which brings me
back to Karen’s commentary, where she makes such a landmark big deal out of Doug’s
proclaimedly-terrible “screaming” at her in one specific incident. Perhaps Doug wasn’t
just acting out here, as she makes it seem. Unlike Karen, who promotes as virtuous the
acidic delusion that her personal shadow doesn’t affect her public life (she writes, “And
what gives [Mitch]—or his followers—the right to tell me about my goddamn ‘shadow’
when I have not asked for his ‘help,’ thank you very much.”), I and Doug both know all
too well that our own shadows need to be inclusively considered in all this in order to
accurately foster the better integrative gay self-realization project within instead of one-
sidedly acting out irresponsibly on others, and I know that even from before the
situation with Karen arose, Doug was committedly working to face his shadow in his
own therapy and in our organizing efforts together. In doing so, Doug was learning to
 32

become a new kind of gay movement figure, a psychological activist of homosexual self-
alchemy, and that pioneering position in my opinion was what he was attempting to
enunciate with Karen in the incident which so polarized her. From this more progressive
point of view, it is Karen who ignorantly betrays the heart and soul of gay liberation
when she crudely disparages Doug or anyone sincerely trying to address the gay shadow
problem personally, comprehensionally and communally, when she merely attacks him
for what was likely a rare opportunity to more seriously grapple with these unpleasant,
perhaps, but vitally significant matters of fuller gay psyche, soul and freedom that he
was perhaps inviting her to take up with his provocative stance to her.

Karen’s endlessly-festering and secretive outrage over Doug’s strong position in their
dealings long ago regarding the dying Michael Callen, reveals to anyone with any insight
into the compensatory and duplicitous nature of the psychological shadow that what she
vengefully accuses Doug of doing likely amounts significationally to a defensive
deflection of her own disowned emotional and behavioral self. Moreover, her renounced
shadow is further revealed when she fails to allow for the serious possibility that Doug’s
side of the disputed incident between them is anything but malign, thus again
demonstrating her escapist tendency to easily demonize those she doesn’t like or
understand because of her own problematic psychology. In this case, her accusation that
Doug’s selfish agenda was to somehow prevent Michael from better reuniting with his
family, even if that was true (which it is not), would still suggest how insidiously
homophobic her thinking is, because she seems so oblivious to the glaring promotional
symbolism of her own pro-familial stance. From a gay-centered perspective, the family
system inherently is oppressively heterosexist and thus effectively homophobic if not
overtly extensively corrected for. According to Doug (see his statement herein), before
Karen had arrived on the Michael Callen care scene, Michael had been very much
engaged in developing a strong gay-centered attitude and had vigorously expressed to
Doug, who was in charge of his overall care, that he wanted to die a “gay death,” without
the contamination of his biological family who had caused such great grief throughout
his life. He was particularly afraid they might take advantage of his weaker moments
and wanted Doug to help protect him from that. This is entirely plausible to me, and
lends further credence to then seeing Karen’s final act with Michael which Doug then
vigorously confronted her on, wherein she spontaneously facilitated a last-minute phone
“reconciliation” between an all-but comatose Michael and his parents while Doug wasn’t
there, as a passive-aggressive, homophobic and self-aggrandizing effort to actually
uphold the oppressive status quo in the end. That Don Kilhefner was a sort of supportive
spiritual advisor to her around this time, as she also reveals, additionally suggests his
own otherwise-hidden connection to the psychologically regressive, anti-liberationist
mentality Karen displays in the affair of Michael’s death and her blog discussion of it as
well as generally. How disgusting to think that she may have been guided by Don to view
her reactionary animus to Doug as about some kind of, as she says he put it, “spiritual
path,” when that hostile attitude was more likely intended to protect from exposure how
she had badly used Michael as a private pawn in her own misguided agenda to uphold
heterosexist institutions at his defenseless expense.

In Conclusion

In sum, this piece has argued for the pivotally-timely importance of gay-centered inner
work through thematically thereso illustratively responding to Karen Ocamb’s
meanhearted attack on me and my friends in her news article and blog commentary
 33

about our protest against Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson’s 30th anniversary Radical
Faerie retrospective on Feb. 15, 2009. In mounting this commentary on the need for
better gay psychological awareness, I wanted to focus less on Don because I had written
about my experiences with him in my earlier protest statement, and because he is also
dealt with elsewhere in this blog, yet because the current demonstration flare-up was
instigated by Don’s covert manipulations in recent public writings and pronouncements
about Radical Faerie history, it was necessary to re-visit to some extent my relations to
him. In general, I wanted to address Karen’s complaints about us protestors primarily
through relating my own history and experience of the matters at hand, a history I feel
Karen, Don and Mark try to avoid about me, and an honest recounting of which I hope
effectively conveys a valid and even beneficial perspective on the vital activist effort to
help usher in the revolutionary next psychological stage of gay liberation organizing and
result. In my own commentary, then, I briefly went through my history of involvement
with the early Radical Faeries and with Don, Harry Hay, Mitch Walker and in particular
with Mark Thompson, because he has been most actively supporting Don in the violent
effort to significationally erase appropriate recognition of Mitch’s contributions to the
Radical Faerie scene and by implication the importance of those contributions about the
gay shadow and gay-centered inner work to the gay movement overall. Because my own
history with Mark is experientially thick, there are matters I can recount which are not
accessible elsewhere. In that testimonial vein, I showed how Mark’s involvement in the
more progressive work to functionally actualize a gay psychological theory and practice
began somewhat peripherally yet grew over time, as did my intimate relationship with
him, which all culminated in an ongoing inner-work group we both devotedly
participated in for several years until the big blow-up about his questionable
competence, thus demonstrating that Karen’s portrayal of me and my friends as merely
trouble-making pests is far from reality. I described how it was Mark who had meanly
betrayed his friends, citing two public letters rebuking him for those bad behaviors
entailed in his cowardly reversal, thus arguing that it is Karen who enables
dysfunctional and destructive “leadership” in her blind support of irresponsible Mark
and Don. Finally, I wanted to put in my two cents supporting my associate Doug
Sadownick in the face of what I see as Karen’s particularly unfair assault on him,
especially considering how her influential position as news editor at the only L.A. gay
and lesbian paper allows her by fact or reputation to broadcast her anti-psychological
rationalizations, and thus her revenge politics, to a potentially large audience at Doug’s
highlighted expense.

I have also tried in my discussion to allude to my own subjective self-awareness and

ongoing inner work as a further way to distinguish myself from my opponents. Although
it has been challenging for me to get down this statement carefully and intelligibly, I
have found the opportunity to do so growthful and encouraging, and it is my hope that
some of this more expansive quality may have been conveyed in the account herein
articulated concerning the same-sex-loving struggle to better psychologically organize
gay liberation theory and practice today.

Copyright © 2010 by Gay Psyche Politics Collective