www.gaypsychepolitics.blogspot.

com

So What if I Screamed?
Responding to Karen Ocamb’s Blog, Don Kilhefner’s Lies,
and My Own Provoked Shame and Rage, as an Act of
Gay-Centered Psychological Activism

by Douglas Sadownick

Preamble

This blog entry intends to reply to some nasty things being said about me and some
friends of mine, and about gay organizing endeavors we are involved with, in the course
of which statement, I am going to dish some serious dirt on some important activists of
the modern gay liberation movement, in what I hope will amount not to mere gossip or
revenge, but to a helpful meditation on the status of homosexual psychological ethics (or
lack thereof) in Los Angeles and in overall gay community life nowadays. While this
analysis may prove arcane to some, perhaps to those not from L.A. or those
disinterested in matters of intra-homosexual politics related to Gay Spirit or
psychological self-awareness (or the necessary interrelationship of the two), I hope to
clarify how key points raised in this preliminary psycho-history might possess some
objective helpfulness towards better undertaking an epic new kind of organizational
effort increasingly challenging all same-sex-loving activists to momentously consider,
the landmark effort of carrying gay liberation into its next, psychological stage.

By attempting a truly thoughtful exposition into importantly subjective matters, I

should point out that it is all the more incumbent on me to consequently appreciate the
manner in which the following meditations will inevitably be arising from and thus
contaminated by, as all writings are, my own psychological reality and its limitations
from, among other things, growing up gay in a heterosexist world. In line with that
acknowledgement, then, I’d like to balance the discussion I am about to undertake
through owning what Jungian thought considers the “problem of the shadow” in my gay
psyche and how that may be involved with my argument. As well is it relevant here to
note, of course, that I am certainly no bystanding observer to the matters at hand, but
am indeed passionately, although I hope not blindly, involved. In that regard, then,
perhaps my not-insignificant relevant experience and knowledgeability concerning the
topics we will here be delving into further, which assets have been garnered through two
decades of gay-centered inner work, scholarship, activism and teaching (such as, more
recently, through my role as inaugural Director of the innovative LGBT Specialization in
Clinical Psychology at Antioch University Los Angeles, the first such graduate training
program in the country, and also through my efforts as a founding member of the
Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis in West Hollywood, the first
educational and training facility devoted to analytically understanding homosexual
individuation as a deeply valuable, even sacred path of estimable self-realization for gay
people and for all human beings), will prove helpful in navigating my way through the
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various challenges entailed in the following journey with a full measure of authentic
honesty, fairness and accuracy.

Since I hope, in the course of my narrative, to try to attend to when and how my own
shadow complexes may be becoming activated, I will begin here, at the start, with the
subjective fact hitting me now, that I find it quite difficult to clearly write in a gay-
centered and coherent way at all, due both to the manner in which my traumatized early
psychology takes me into literary “car wrecks” on a regular basis when I try, as well as to
how my emotional impulsivity and narcissistic neediness attempt to obfuscate my better
objectivity and a fair Gay Spirit orientation in formulating what I am going to say in the
first place. The power plays I am trying to expose in our community mirror power plays
going on in my inner object relations, my subjective dynamic themes, I am sure.
Likewise, the brooding civil war between psychological mindfulness and mindless
allegiance to insidious psychological violence erupts in my lived experience (which is
that of a gay man attempting a proudly gay-centering existence in a contemporary
human world increasingly driven toward madness by unbridled heterosexism and its
attendant symptomology of extroversion, commercialism, numbing assimilation and so
on) when I contemplate how to construct this hopefully-dialectical essay in a well-done
fashion to then reactively face a rising affective tide of internal doubt and corrosive self-
criticism which proceeds to flood me with potentially-crippling toxic shame,
accompanying images of terrible self-loathing and the desperate need to escape.

Part I of this blog details the historical and situational context of an ACT-UP styled
protest that I and some activist friends held on February 15, 2009, focusing in particular
on the ongoing deceptions being spun by Los Angeles gay community “elder” Don
Kilhefner that were part of the catalyst for this demonstration.

Part II concerns analysis of a defamatory blog commentary written by L.A. LGBT

journalist Karen Ocamb in response to the demonstration that included her revisionist
“take” on a relationship with a now-deceased friend she and I had shared many years
ago.

In both of these parts, followed by a brief concluding summary of my entire statement, I

will include my perspective on the presumed intent and possible reasoning behind both
Don’s and Karen’s distortions—and the implications thereof for the greater gay
liberation movement itself, as we all decide if we are going to more so evolve as valuably
same-sex-loving or instead procreatively stagnate homosexually to then regressively
dissolve into assimilationist irrelevance.

 
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Part I: The Radical Faerie Demonstration

Setting the Scene

In February of 2009, Los Angeles LGBT community journalist Karen Ocamb got herself
into a truly nasty journalistic tizzy over a campy and well-received demonstration
approximately 15-30 activist friends of mine and I had the relative audacity to hold in
front of the parking lot entrance to the One National Gay and Lesbian Archives near the
University of Southern California campus one Sunday afternoon, where, for several
hours, we greeted people with protest signs, lively chants and informational materials
including an extensive explanatory statement about our protest (see “Wendell Jones’
Protest Statement” in the March 2009 archive of this blog).

We were demonstrating against a 30-year-retrospective on the founding of the Radical

Faerie movement that longtime gay community leaders Don Kilhefner and Mark
Thompson were giving, which retrospective wound up being attended by well over 100
people. Karen then wrote a biased report on the demonstration in the gay newsmagazine
Frontiers in L.A., to which was attached a blog entry referral that led to some went-to-
town dishing-the-dirt about the demonstrators and their intentions, in particular really
taking me to task personally for some “water-under-the-bridge” stuff between her and
me regarding the care of a dying singer named Michael Callen.

The vocal but cheerful protest against Don and Mark’s presentation at the One Archives
centered around the fact/idea that the two men were engaging in a shady business of
manipulative historical revisionism—with the seemingly uninformed support of various
people such as Karen. They were out to tout their warped and factually inaccurate
version of how a movement little known by most gay and lesbian people today, but
perhaps terribly important to our further same-sex-loving destiny, got started, and what
then became of it: the Radical Faeries.

The Faerie movement is historically important because it marks the first large-scale
effort to organize gay-identified men on an indigenously-homosexual spiritual basis,
unlike gay synagogues, churches, etc., thereby enunciating a freshly-profound degree of
gay-centering interest—the notion of an endogenous Gay Spirit—that has not only
crystallized what is now an ongoing tradition of homosexually-foregrounded spiritual
literature (e.g., de la Huerta, 1999; Johnson, 2000, 2003; Thompson, 1987/2005, 1994)
and activities but, even more pertinently in regard to the issues at hand, has set the
historical stage for a broader and currently more-controversial conversation, now taking
place, which concerns extending that pioneering Faerie sensibility into a gay-centering,
psychological, grassroots therapeutics and activism.

The visionary homosexual movement of the Radical Faeries was originated in the later
1970s principally by three committed gay activists: Harry Hay (co-founder of the
Mattachine Society in 1950, the first lasting attempt to organize gays on a political basis
in North America1), Don Kilhefner (co-founder of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian
Center in 1971, the first institution of its kind) and Mitch Walker (the first “out” gay
author to be published in a prominent Jungian journal in 1976). John Burnside, Harry’s

 
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lover, should also be named as an important supporting (“passive-aggressive”?) figure
standing by Harry’s side through it all.

The group issued “A Call to Gay Brothers” in the Spring of 1979 for “A Spiritual
Conference for Radical Faeries” that September Labor Day which was subsequently
attended quite successfully by an overflow crowd of 220 enthusiastic men, leading to the
birth of a new gay cultural phenomenon which has since spread around the world
(McCleary, 2004; Thompson, 1987/2005; see also www.radfae.org;
www.radicalfaeries.net; www.rfdmag.org).

In the version of this Faerie birth story currently being told by Don Kilhefner, now
supported by Mark, Karen and others, not only do movement co-founder Mitch Walker,
his important participation and his theoretical/practical contributions have hardly any
presence or significance, but there is not even mention of a huge controversy and schism
that developed in the early Faerie organizing group due to Mitch’s trailblazing insistence
both on honestly facing psychological shadow issues (that is, negative and contradictory
subjective motives) which were getting acted out personally among and by individual
organizers and as a group, and on fairly recognizing that such difficult issues were
intimately entailed in what sincerely pursuing the vision of Radical Faerie self-becoming
meant in practice, rather than, as usual, shadow problems being left to the domination
of unconscious, unexamined ego-defenses operating within a social “law of the jungle”
morality. Mitch’s ethically-daring and controversial stance within the organizing group
eventually lead to an ideological polarization into two opposing camps on the decisive
issue of Faeries needing to be purposefully psychologically-minded, which split
historically crystallized irreparably when Don deliberately joined with Mitch to heatedly
resign from the founding circle at its Summer Solstice 1981 meeting to start a
psychologically-oriented pursuit of the Faerie gay vision, while the anti-psychological
faction, led by Harry and John, pursued a campaign of ignoring, scapegoating and
demonizing the rebels as irrelevant, as the cause of any problems going on and as
viciously hateful, even antisocial and psychotic, people.

It then appears that, after Don and Mitch had worked together for several years in their
successor organizing group, Treeroots, Don realized that his continued sincere
participation would actually require his becoming much more open with himself and the
other organizers about his own shadow business, rather than merely upholding Mitch’s
views with platitudes while persisting in keeping his own shadow psychology secretively
hidden away, and at that point Don then suddenly turned on Mitch, privately accused
him enragedly of being a vicious exploiter, and then refused to have anything more to do
with him personally, although he continued to participate in Treeroots for another
decade. Since Don quit Treeroots in 1994, he has gradually taken over Harry’s old role of
erasing and demonizing Mitch and the history I have just outlined, while himself
claiming to now possess all those attributes that were being homosexually forged by his
one-time closest associate Mitch Walker when they worked together, such as Don’s
claims to being a gay Jungian theorist/psychotherapist, a gay shaman and a gay
psychologist-community leader. Since Don has risen in the last decade to greater
prominence, through his ongoing column in Frontiers in L.A. gay newsmagazine as well
as in diverse other articles and public presentations, his intent to control the Faerie
story has meant a persistent and so far fairly-successful effort to defame and blacklist
 
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Mitch, his ideas and associates while Don puts out his ideas and associates as the only
viable versions of gay psychological theory/activism and the kind of people to be trusted
in these matters, people such as Mark Thompson, who has his own ax to grind with
Mitch over the same kind of shadow problem, and more recently, Karen as well, who, it
turns out, has secretly carried on honing a big ax against me and anyone associated with
me for her own reasons for a very long time, a matter I will explore below.

The basic birth story of the Radical Faerie movement, and some material about the
eventual schism that emerged over the central question posed by Mitch and later Don
(shouldn’t the Faeries be psychologically responsible?)—can be found in a few history
books and archival documents (e.g., Hay, 1996; McCleary, 2004; Thompson, 1987/2005;
Timmons, 1990) but there is little as yet that offers much discussion of or even access to
the fuller historical picture I will be exploring here, other than the dwindling number of
still-living participants and what pertinent documentary material there may be.
Therefore, I would like to use the occasion of this blog statement to sketch out aspects of
that bigger picture as I have come to understand it over time, such as the story of Don
turning on Mitch I mentioned above, which I first heard from Mitch years ago. To do so, I
rely for the established account of the early development and schism of the Radical
Faerie movement on Stuart Timmons’ biography, The Trouble with Harry Hay (1990),
which is based on considered interviews with all the main actors of the time, and, in
regard to some of the dishier aspects of Faerie history I will get into, I will be relying not
only on personal recollections but on a large body of freshly accessible (and rather juicy)
personal letters written by Don Kilhefner to Mitch Walker during the early Faerie period,
some of the revealing contents of which I will shortly share.

A Historical Digression—But Important!

The first pairing of nascent Faerie leadership took place between Harry, who, along with
John, was living in New Mexico on a Native American reservation and writing about
traditions of gay-centered consciousness, and Mitch, who was living in San Francisco
and coincidentally developing a novel theory and practice of gay-centered depth
psychology.

By the age of 25, Mitch was already a seriously-involved gay community activist of four
years who had also published a groundbreaking article, “The Double: An Archetypal
Configuration,” in the prestigious Jungian journal Spring (1976), along with having
formulated, even earlier, a brilliant master’s thesis on the individuational nature of gay
identity. As noted above, Harry had co-founded the Mattachine Society in 1950, the first
sustained attempt to organize gays in North America, an endeavor leading to our
modern gay liberation movement of today, which act he then continued to follow in the
tradition of through his ongoing, full-time activism and scholarship up to his meeting
Mitch.

The bonding between Harry and Mitch took place first through letters and calls that
Mitch initiated in the spring of 1976, followed by a first face-to-face meeting that
summer in San Francisco, and then an extended trip Mitch subsequently took to see
Harry in New Mexico. According to Stuart Timmons: “Meeting Walker was a critical link
in Harry’s development of a new kind of gay movement” (1990, p. 260). Not unlike how
 
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Harry formed the Mattachine Society with Rudi Gernreich in 1950, adds Stuart, “Walker
and Hay formed the ‘society of two’ that grew into the Radical Faeries” (p. 260). Stuart
gives Mitch credit for much of the magical ethos that would infuse the Faerie movement,
when he describes how “The mythic, hidden aspects of gay identity that [Harry and
Mitch] had studied separately suddenly converged, with a greatly increased current” (p.
260).

Don was later brought along, in part because of his stellar reputation as a community
organizer, in particular as co-founder of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Community Services
Center, and also in part due to his passionate interest in Harry and Mitch’s gay-centered
visionary concerns. The three radicals, writes Stuart, quoting Mitch, then “made a
‘three-sided square’” with John Burnside “helping out as needed” (Timmons, 1990, p.
262) in terms of the budding effort to successfully promulgate a new gay movement.

Don Agrees with Mitch—Not Harry!

It turns out that Don wrote many intimate personal letters to Mitch over the years that
they were closely working together to found the Faerie movement and then Treeroots
(1978-1983), letters that only stopped because they became close neighbors in L.A.,
letters that are most loving and sensitively respectful towards Mitch, situating him as
the chief inheritor of a sacred gay essentialist heritage, an ancient homosexual shamanic
lineage renewed best in modern times first by Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter,
then extending by way of people like Harry to Mitch himself (“I see, however, a very
clear lineage of spirit connecting you four fairies…” he writes in one missive [Don
Kilhefner letters to Mitch Walker; 4-26-1980]). Indeed, Don, turned on by his exposure
to such a richly gay-centered creative atmosphere as Harry and Mitch were generating,
seems to have formed a particularly strong intellectual and personal bond with Mitch,
who, at an early stage, appears to be taking Don under his wing by encouraging him to
begin practicing gay-centered inner work (e.g., noticing his feelings in a gay fashion and
attending to how his mind could be working in certain heterosexist and codependent
ways, entering therapy, etc). Don responds gratefully in turn, regaling Mitch with a
variety of diminutives (e.g., “Beloved Mitch…thinking of you warmly” [12-11-78];
“Namaste sweet one” [1-13-80]) and encomiums (e.g., “You feed me like no one else I
know” [4-22-1981]), going so far as to often sign his name set with several little red
hearts and to even write Mitch one letter all in a big red Heart, drawn affectionally as a
child would for a Valentine’s Day gift: “HI TOOTS—I KNOW–YOU THINK MY HEARTS ARE
CORNY, BUT I CAN’T HELP IT, IT’S IN MY JEANS—LOVED YOUR LETTER—YUM-YUM...YES, YES,
YES—WE’RE GOING TO DO IT—YES, YES, YES” [11-14-1981]).

Don’s dozens of letters and card messages to Mitch reporting on organizing details and
situations as well as his personal life, by the way, offer a wonderful cornucopia of
historical raw material, and well document the expression of gay spiritual love dawning
in a freshly-individuating homosexual person, making clear the debt Don owes not just
to Harry’s important gay-centering ideas, but even more so to Mitch’s psychological
versions, and, additionally, how it is that Don started waking up to what he calls, in one
of his earlier letters, Harry’s “contradictions,” at Mitch’s persistent behest and, after
great struggle, then finally joins in a sea-change activist union with Mitch to officially
separate from the other founding Faeries and pioneer a more psychologically-oriented,
 
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non-profit educational organization, Treeroots, dedicated to the estimable homosexual
self-realization of Gay Spirit and Gay Soul through overtly addressing subjective gay
shadow and archetypal relations.

Harry Hay and the Unconscious (Who Doesn’t Have One?)

The initial Faerie gathering proved ecstatic for many. But vision is one thing, and
human personalities another.

No one who had ever met Harry Hay, including me, could avoid being faced not only
with a powerful charismatic presence but with his garrulous personality (putting it
mildly) or aggressive narcissism (to put it more aptly) as well. About this darker feature
of his own psychology, however, Harry played dumb. “He wanted to talk to me about my
‘leadership complex,’” Harry told Stuart in the biography vis-à-vis a confrontational
incident with Mitch where Harry became incensed. “And I didn’t understand, because as
far as I know I don’t have one” (Timmons, 1990, p. 263).

Not that I think it’s entirely fair to compare myself to Harry, especially given the
particular antipathy towards a more psychologically-minded attitude gay men of his
generation commonly understandably developed due to how homophobic the field had
been and often still remains, but as someone who has had to face his own “leadership
complex,” I find Harry’s blanket denial either naïve or disingenuous. Isn’t it at heart true
that all of one’s idealism (inflation?) in wanting to join with others for the greater gay
good is best realized if one then also takes into account one’s inevitable and often rather
ominous gay shadow personality of unresolved interior contradictions, traumas and bad
feelings that not only goes along for the ride but even more so enjoys sabotaging sincere
gay intentions as its own queerly-tricksterish way of contrarily insisting on first being
related to better itself and eventually then being reparatively humanized integratively
toward a truly-larger homosexual end?

First off, there is the general archetypal aspect of the shadow problem impacting
existential human life (the Jungian view). Each human being must face the subjective
bifurcation in the personality of competing unconscious and conscious “selves,” a
condition which has historically evolved as a result of humanity metaphorically being
exiled from the Garden of Eden of what must have been our original mental innocence
and unconscious wholeness in instinctual animal life. This historically-generated,
intrapsychic war-of-wills has now been dialectically evolving towards the breaking point
for an aeon, fed ever more vigorously by the still-incomplete rise of a relatively-stronger
ego complex post-Enlightenment. The compensatory shadow cast by a better-willed ego
is presently in my opinion an indisputable fact of rational/technological life which we
humans broadly refuse to realistically recognize, despite the greater social and ecological
holocausts stalking our times with growing proximity in dire consequence.

And in the context of this gathering, archetypally-sourced, historical shadow dilemma,

specifically in relation to same-sex-loving life today, lies the more particular Marxist-
Freudian phenomenal fact of a millennium’s-worth and more of persistent
State/Ecclesiastical-sponsored homophobic violence in Western cultural traditions now

 
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filtered through the mind-fuck of our so-called loving but quite heterosexist parents
cradling us in their resulting crass consciousness.

It is certainly the case with me, apropos gay shadow problems, that without ongoing
therapy and significant help from supportive others for my own foul heterosexist
trauma, I would today be little more than a psychological invalid masquerading as a
decent gay person.

So how is it possible that Harry could not have had any important shadow issues for
himself entailed in being a big gay leader and thinker?2 But as is too typically the case
with highly defended people, the attempt by Mitch to honestly address what seemed to
be a significant problem in regard to Harry’s own unintegrated aggression and will to
dominate along with the consequent supine and even enabling cooperation of the
organizing group as a whole, was reactively demonized unconditionally and persistently
by Harry as itself violently aggressive via what seems to me to have been, speaking in a
psychoanalytic way, the unaware defensive projection of a strong negative transference
onto Mitch that an emotionally-polarizing Harry fiercely refused to face.

To Punish the Gay-Centering Psychological Messenger is Homophobic,

One-Dimensional and the Vestige of a Dying Ethic

Despite that Stuart’s account of the confrontational incident referred to above between
Harry and Mitch is biased in favor of Harry’s version by way of suggestively
characterizing Mitch as narcissistically attempting to pressure Harry to unreasonably
accept Mitch’s form of psychologizing, my own personal experiences of the parties
involved (including of Stuart) is that this characterization actually amounts to a
projection by Stuart as well as by Harry—that is, they are the ones unselfreflectively
forcing others to accept their “one-dimensional” views of psychology (The psychological
defense of projection, by the way, in which one finds some distasteful aspect of oneself
in someone else instead of in oneself, seems to me a ubiquitous and rampantly-
employed psychodynamic maneuver among unselfreflective people and the societies
they create today).

By “one-dimensional,” I am referring to political theorist Herbert Marcuse’s

psychological notion of how it is that a “false consciousness which is immune against its
falseness” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 12) gets created by certain figures in “advanced industrial
societies” to oppressively control discourse therein. The “one-dimensional man” [sic]
suffocates “needs which demand liberation” through the way he or she reduces
complexity in thought such that the “false consciousness of [this] rationality becomes
the true consciousness” for that individual and the entire community (p. 11).3

Mitch Walker, while fiery as a person committed to gay-centered truth and eros, is also,
as I can honestly attest to after having been associated with him for a long time now, the
most aware and responsible man in terms of his own personal psychology whom I have
ever met—not to mention the kindest and funniest.

Mitch does not in the least deserve the nasty shadow projections meanly aimed his way
by those who are actually righteous gay upholders of “the old ethic,” a term used by

 
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Jungian analyst Erich Neumann (1969/1990) to distinguish between the ancient system
of repressive social control where the shadow is projected onto a scapegoated “other,”
and “the new ethic,” a coming, better-matured human morality wherein the shadow is
more accurately and responsibly owned inwardly as a problem of subjective provenance,
eventually to be personified within as a would-be alchemical friend.

I have never seen Mitch, nor can I imagine him, irresponsibly acting out his shadow
business in the abusive ways I several times encountered with Harry, as I will relate
below. Now, I have witnessed Mitch to at times become expressively quite angry and
raise his voice intensely when confronting what he felt was intense emotional violence
directed at him from someone else, but I have observed him during those times as
consistently holding to a careful ethic to stay with what he deems is the truth about the
situation there being confronted while recognizing the subjective integrity of all parties
involved, meaning that while Mitch could be intimidating and willful in a similar
manner to how Harry often struck many who knew him, I always felt a strong qualitative
or moral difference in their styles or uses of strong feeling, such that Mitch did not stoop
to any of the nasty dehumanizational maneuvers I noted with Harry (and others).

But it is Mitch who is routinely smeared as some kind of unethical monster and
accordingly scapegoated by the self-righteous likes of Don, Mark, Karen and their
supporters, all inheritors of Harry’s animus towards Mitch, and they do so, in my
opinion, for the same defensive reason as with Harry, because Mitch, in his work, now at
the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis, vigorously challenges the
violent acting-out behavior and parallel entrenched one-dimensionality of thought
plaguing gay activist life (and all activist life as far as I can tell) by persistently naming
and attempting to address this problem directly, and by supporting others who are also
trying to really “walk the talk,” to use a street term, of being deeply gay and committedly
psychological, all of whom are there so bravely undertaking to “right the historical
record” about, and reinvigorate what is worth salvaging in, that still-fresh vision for
better homosexual personhood and society espoused by the Radical Faeries 30 years
ago, through infusing it in the present day with attemptedly gay-centered psychological
self-awareness for themselves, each other and the world.

Herbert Marcuse talks about pernicious invisible forces in “advanced industrial society”
that tend to “liquidate elements” trying to bring “Time and Memory” back to personal
and collective liberational life. These totalitarian forces inside us all, according to
Marcuse, are aimed at little more than a total “fight against history,” because accurate
“remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insight” regarding a freer future
(Marcuse, 1964, p. 98).

Crazy About Harry

I first met Harry Hay in 1989 when I was writing a cover story for the L.A. Weekly
(Sadownick, 1990) on the Gay Spirit movement, just at about the same time as I had
started practicing gay-centered, inner psychological work. Going to his home in
Hollywood on La Cresta Court that he shared with John Burnside and a couple others, I
encountered a tall, dignified yet lively and personable man with his sparse white hair in
a short ponytail, by this time in his later 70s, who immediately struck me inspirationally
 
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with the wonderfully-serious gravitas of his gay charismatic dynamism. He spent several
hours teaching me about the history of gay-centering thought I will detail more of in
Part II, as well as about the Radical Faeries. He also looked deeply into my eyes, telling
me he could recognize the lovely Faerie boy inside of me. I felt seen, heard,
appreciated—and worried. I had already tasted enough therapy to be aware of how I
might, in the face of his close and affectionate attention, be starting to project my own
distortional, shadow, looksist complex onto him in now distastefully seeing Harry as
nothing but a “dirty old man” who was seemingly graciously giving me so much time as
a well-practiced cover to then take ruthless advantage of a nubile gay person. I tried to
inwardly partner this homophobic projection and, rather, to open up to him; it was not
lost on me how “historical” the moment of being alone with this queer sage was.
However, despite my best efforts to contain my homophobic paranoia, Harry did indeed
confirmatorily walk right into my proverbial fears. At some point he lifted his hands to
my face, whispering that I was a “beautiful Faerie, coming home.” And then he suddenly
clamped his palms and fingers into a surprisingly-vigorous vice grip, pulled on my head
and quickly moved his lips closer and closer to mine, until I soon queasily experienced
the father of the gay liberation movement forcibly tongue-raping me, as he pushed his
probing lingual organ into my confused mouth it seemed as far as it would go and then
started rubbing around, even though I was not responding (being pretty stunned).

However, there could have been worse things. After my initial surprise gave way to
disbelief, then anger, hurt and resentment as he kept it up, I firmly but gently pulled
away. (At the time, I was too codependent as a person to be able to realistically engage
him in any kind of frank sharing about what had just gone on). We then proceeded as if
nothing had happened, enjoying the rest of a nice-enough talk about the “Faerie vision,”
and after that I stayed in touch with him, including several other significant
interactions, and have a wonderful picture of us together at the 1993 March on
Washington, although my feelings of hurt, disgust and disappointment with his
molestation and subsequent obliviousness about it also stayed with me privately over
the years, reinforced by several lesser encounters with Harry’s coercive side, such as one
later incident where he started aggressively intimidating me about becoming a
“troublemaker” associate of Mitch Walker, which repeated incidents helped me
appreciate how serious was Harry’s duplicitous aspect.

When Mitch, during the height of early Faerie organizing (1978-1981), tried to point out
similar hypocrisies (Mitch has said that he was vigorously mouth-raped also at his first
meeting with Harry in 1976) that apparently were typically erupting from Harry’s
domineering personality, at first genially indicating what a contradiction it was that the
leader advancing “subject-subject consciousness” as an indigenously-enriching
characteristic of compassionate gay mental functioning could seem to be at times
exploitationally controlling and meanly punishing in the manner of a straight
patriarchal authority-figure, Mitch was only met by blanket denial, tantrums and a
fierce paranoid projection that Mitch was now trying to overthrow Harry and “take
over.”

What is so fascinating about the newly-revealed letters written by Don Kilhefner4 to

Mitch Walker, which Mitch has kindly shared with me, is that they expose the way in
which Don himself got started in gay-centered psychology by learning how to see
 
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Harry’s violence for what it was—the opposite of what is needed in any kind of good
leader, not to mention in someone espousing gay-centered spiritual hopes and dreams.
Here in these letters we see a whole other picture of Harry than his official self-portrait,
and as well we see a “Don” of whom a relatively recent friend of his like Karen Ocamb,
for example, apparently has little knowledge, just as she seems to know nothing about
the “other” Harry. This is the Don who is in 1981 living with Harry and John in Los
Angeles, in a “Faerie sanctuary” at their rented house on La Cresta Court, and who
gradually becomes increasingly exasperated:

Right now I’m feeling like I want to get a good paying job to get some money to
allow me to move out of here as quickly as possible. If I’m going to be alone, I’d
rather do it in my own apartment somewhere than in a house with other “loving,
sharing” people. (6-14-81)

The Cleaning Episode

Don’s “education of the heart” about the underlying reality with Harry is best rendered
in a June 14, 1981 letter to Mitch, about halfway through the entire series of missives.
Don starts this communication by writing, “Hi Toots,” then saying “things started
closing in today,” and Don “thought that perhaps a letter to Mitch about what’s been
happening” would help, that Don and his housemate Michael are “being punished—
given a super-duper deep freeze by Mother and Father,” that is, by Harry and John. Don
says “it’s high camp melodrama for sure,” but it’s also making Don “feel like shit.” The
“background” is that Michael and Don had called a meeting with Harry and John a while
back to “discuss the fact that we were slowly being suffocated in all the dirt, paper and
stuff that H and J had around,” and Don and Michael “suggested the need for a spring
housecleaning.” H and J said they “needed some time to get their things put away
properly,” a few weeks, but as time moved on, “there was absolutely no effort by H & J to
get their junk taken care of; indeed the piles got higher.” Faced with total inertia, Don
and Michael got together with the other two again and they all unanimously settled on a
firm date for cleaning. After neither Harry nor John said anything about it as that fateful
day approached, John then tried to defer the effort again the night before, but Don and
Michael stuck to their guns.

Don relays that he and M “are up and about 9 a.m.” start housecleaning the kitchen
alcove, which “is piled high with H’s papers, old newspapers, junk, moldy fruit, etc.”
Don sorts and gathers it all neatly together. John “comes in & doesn’t say a word, goes to
the front porch to read the newspaper, and then into his bedroom where he and H
remain” until almost noon, while the other two keep cleaning. After that, H & J then
leave the house to go somewhere without saying anything, but then John quickly returns
to ask that the junk in the living room be left alone for now and another cleaning day be
arrived at, but Don and Michael again hold firm, saying, “we’ll neatly put H’s stuff in a
box for him.” This is in turn met with complete “silence,” and then “the Foreign Minister
returns to the waiting Monarch to report that the Court Jesters have taken over.” The
two then “come storming back into the house [and]…they are white with rage.” Don
repeatedly says that “not a word is spoken” by either H or J at this time, but the two men
are “furious....Angry vibrations emanate from all around them,” as they “start taking
everything in sight that belongs to them in boxes and carrying them to the garage.” Don
 
  12

 
then adds, “Finally, J tries to guilt trip me by saying that H had a ‘trauma’ when he came
out of his bedroom and saw all his important papers that were on the kitchen table,
piled on the dining room table.” Don vents about how those papers prevented anyone
from using the space: “In fact, he’s taken over just about every table with his stuff,” and
also how “we agreed by consensus [Don’s emphasis and one of H’s favorite group
decision-making notions] that this would be” the cleaning day. Michael and Don then
continue their efforts as the again-silent Harry and John leave once more, returning
some time later to subject D and M to a continuing “deep freeze.” Explains Don, “They
don’t stay in the same room with me. They don’t talk to me. I’ve been a naughty boy and
I’m being punished.” He feels “terrible.” Don and Michael discuss the crappy situation,
and decide that the real problem is not about cleaning or messy papers, “it was about
power and control in the house. They act like it’s their house and M and I are just
guests.” Indeed, Don realizes that H and J had never wanted equality in the house to
begin with, even though they constantly talked about fairness and so on.

Later in the letter, Don relates how he had already told Harry and John several days
earlier that working with Mitch was very “significant” to him, and further, that his
“admiration and respect for Mitch Walker continues to deepen [emphases in the
original],” with the implication that these attitudes have now strengthened even more
due to the cleaning day episode. Don ends the letter hoping his venting doesn’t bring
Mitch down. Although he’s feeling “very angry” at the way Harry and John have treated
him, he then shrugs, “What’s the use,” since “there is no way of working with” the
problem with H & J “in a way it’ll be heard.”

Later letters detail how Don was moving ever-more intimately into a seriously-involved
union with Mitch and with Mitch’s ideas (including the notion of holding “Primeval
Slime Workshops” to address all that dark material being exiled by Harry and John)
while simultaneously moving away from Harry’s person and formulations, a sea-change
in allegiance dramatically demonstrated at the June 1981 Summer Solstice meeting of
the Faerie core organizing group, the Gay Vision Circle, attended by Harry, John, Mark,
Mitch, Don and several others. According to the account given in Stuart Timmons’
biography, at the meeting

Don began complaining of problems he was having with John and Harry. He
talked about the accusation of Faerie Fascism, and said he believed Harry and
John were power-tripping, especially Harry. He was not specific, but he
eventually reached his point, which was that he was resigning, that his “heart was
no longer in the project.” (Timmons, 1990,
p. 282)

This move was followed by an analogous complaint from Mitch, who then also resigned.
Through this coordinated action, which had been planned out carefully beforehand, Don
and Mitch together formally departed from the Faeries to create the nonprofit
corporation Treeroots, a portentous turn of events for the future of important gay
possibilities, the historical implications of which resonate even more so today than at
the time.

But that was then, and this is now. And everything looks different now.
 
  13

So Back to the Main Story

As hopefully the reader can tell by this point, the One Archives demonstration by me
and some associates was engaged in to protest the Don and Mark song-and-dance
charade that disappears key historical facts and processes.
We also had a broader purpose.
We wanted to put forward the idea that a more effective form of grassroots movement
politics than what has so far yet been conceptualized or actualized by Don or Mark or
our other more-official gay leaders might concern itself in an unprecedented manner
with what, although often called “mental health” by bureaucrats and academics, from a
gay liberationist perspective might better be termed “the revolutionary instinct to
personally individuate in a gay way.”
We protesters were worried that this important hygienic idea was and is being
effectively silenced in the more so accessibly mainstream understanding of what was
progressively possible in gay liberation ideology. Writes Marcuse: “In this process, the
‘inner’ dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is
whittled down” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 10).
The general homosexual public, for example, knows very little about the varied creative
efforts and collaborations that flow from what I consider to be the sort of far more
ideationally wealthful and sincerely caring, gay-centering psychological leadership
which does exist in today’s gay community, including the 27-year work of the California
non-profit group Treeroots and, as of late, the Institute for Contemporary Uranian
Psychoanalysis. This lack of enriching public discourse on the most interestingly-
innovative work of those committed gay activists who have better progressively
embraced psychological mindfulness as the necessary next stage of our gay
emancipatory movement, is in no way merely accidental or just due to general anti-
psychological or anti-gay factors, but is in significant part the sad result of active stifling
by some relatively-powerful gay people, a dishonorable organizing effort which is not
only enraging to me as one of those attemptedly-thwarted activists because of its vicious
hypocrisy, but more foundationally because such meanspirited opposition is just plain
life-threatening and life-denying to all gay people and even the whole world, as this
“one-dimensionality” of false comprehension plaguing our community casts a veil of
cult-like suspicion on the actual evolutionarily-more-advanced project of
psychologically-enhanced gay soul making in prudent terms of the best homosexual
futurity for ourselves and for everybody, which better possibility then unfortunately
becomes the true victim of oppressively colonizing and impoverishing historical erasure
as two-facedly enacted by the righteous likes of supposedly gay-affirmative friends such
as Don Kilhefner and his collaborators.

1984, Gay Style

Seemingly unaware of the existence of all those choice letters to Mitch, and in an
example of odious historical revanchism of the altering-old-pictures sort famously
depicted in George Orwell’s 1984 (and as well laced with the nasty/campy back-stabbing
 
  14

 
associated with a later Bettie Davis movie—All About Eve, shall we say?), Don has
apparently been able to successfully obliterate just about all public memory of his
powerful distaste for Harry’s psychological violence as well as of the early Faerie schism
in which he took up a major role.

Don enacts and promotes this infectious forgetfulness in many ways. For example, he
writes a monthly column in Frontiers in L.A., the only remaining gay paper in town of
note, in which he regularly lauds himself as a kind of Abraham Lincoln of gay liberation
and of the Radical Faeries, who almost single-handedly bonded with Harry to create the
Faerie movement. This ample self-aggrandizement in the gay media has been going on
for years, despite the fact that more than a few folks gag at Don’s holier-than-thouness
(a retching I have witnessed first hand in various community-organized settings, for
example, when Don at the last minute failed [again!] to show up at last year’s June 2008
Lesbian and Gay Psychotherapy Association of Southern California 14th Annual
Conference, without a phone call even, where people were depending on him to give the
Keynote Address [a cold act he has also pulled off elsewhere over the years]).
Additionally, Don has taken his “I started the Radical Faerie movement with Gay
Founding Father Harry Hay” dog-and-pony show on the circuit, in print and radio
interviews in L.A. and elsewhere, and of course, at the One Archives event in question
here, which we protestors were demonstrating against because we felt thoroughly sick
and tired of the leveraged monopoly Don and his supporters enjoy when it comes to
comparatively uninterrupted, propagandistic publicity in contrast to the attendant
blacklisted silence plaguing those of us who are active with Mitch Walker at the Institute
for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis and elsewhere.5

“In the Dark”—Indeed!

Don’s One Archives presentation was indeed manipulatively one-sided, as I could assess
from later listening to an audio recording made of the entire event, in how he once more
ensconced himself as Harry’s principal partner while marginalizing Mitch as much as
possible, and mentioning nothing about the sensational, big Faerie split in which he was
so involved as a principal partisan participant!

Further, when Don was asked during the question-and-answer period about the
demonstration going on outside and the whole issue of his “lapse” in historical
reckoning by one of the protestors who decided to attend this part of the talk, he gave
the following response: “To tell the truth, I didn't know what the argument was about 30
years ago, and 30 years later I am as much in the dark.” You can see Don saying those
very words on a You Tube video (http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=8dFMYXjE30c; Arimoto, 2009), which will also give you a fuller taste as well
of the demonstration, with attendant commentary.

Cronyism

To make matters more rancid, Don elicits the collusive help of certain “yes-people” to
better grease his underhanded schemes. At the forefront of this corrupt bunch right now
might be journalist Karen Ocamb, who has won some community respect in the past for
trying to write in a competent way about our gay political struggles, but who has also
 
  15

 
raised more than a few eyebrows both for at times seeming to abuse this influential
(albeit entirely local) power for personal motives that hardly appear “objective,” perhaps
most egregiously as demonstrated in her recent handling of the One Archives protest as
I will review below, and then again for what many consider to be her persistent
interpersonal ineffectiveness (due, for example, to her notorious self-absorption about
her own take on current events, which can go on and on).

Another helpful buddy is, oddly enough, Mark Thompson, who acted (from all
appearances) in his typical lumpish way as co-presenter with Don at the protested One
Archives event. How bizarre is this Punch-and-Judy pairing! To give you a full account
of the years-long history involving Mark’s questionable behavior with men he took
under his S&M wing would take volumes, and would itself be quite instructive. Suffice it
to say, for now, that Mark, following Don and Mitch, also broke from the Harry Hay
approach to the Radical Faeries and joined the Treeroots effort, although he did so in his
typically diplomatic way (that is, keeping all options open). During the years I knew
Mark fairly intimately, from 1987-1997, when he was being a sort of mentor to me in
matters of heart related to learning about Faerie sensibility, gay psychology and, for a
short while, the leather world (not ultimately my cup of tea), Mark emerged as the main
spokesperson in the gay community for Mitch’s gay-centered vision and psychological
project. Mark wrote a trilogy of influential books (Gay Spirit [1987/2005], Gay Soul
[1994], Gay Body [1997]) which served ultimately to highlight Mitch’s groundbreaking
efforts to bring depth psychology to Harry’s visionary gay-centering ideas. Mark’s
seemingly relentless commitment to life-saving homosexual conceptions is what drew
me to trust that I could rely on his tutelage, a trust he eventually betrayed.

For a very long time, Mark completely ignored Don, who had angrily walked out on
Mitch (and, through association, Mark as well) in a personal relational sense in 1984
(although Don continued his Treeroots participation until resigning in 1994), it seems as
part of acting out some powerful paranoid projections onto Mitch (Later, Mark would
walk out as well—also for parallel psychodynamic reasons).

So to observe Don and Mark at their Archives event now lie happily in the same stinking
bed of one-dimensionalizing gay history-production, and obliviously yak away with each
other like the best of friends about how wonderful the Faeries were and how lovely it
was to bond with the Saint-like Harry over co-founding that glorious movement (and a
doubly-ironic denouement to boot in that Don had himself renounced any association
with the Radical Faeries for upwards of two decades or more), is just a bit like picturing
fiercely competitive Bettie and Joan suddenly making nice, after ages of trying to throw
each other down the stairs, because of a more-threatening figure now in their midst, one
who can then opportunely be fed to the cat instead.

Fear of the Future

Why does Don meanly machinate this way with Mark and Karen—and against Mitch
and his present friends?

While it isn’t completely clear as to why and how Don elicits such manipulative help
from former foes and influential writers, his revisionist historical approach in taking
 
  16

 
undue credit for the Faerie movement’s formation may be accounted for in some
interesting, albeit predictable, ways.

Besides the obvious “law of the jungle” motive, that would rather kill, so to speak, than
share credit, there might be additionally-disturbing psychological reasons of a type that
could be relevant for all of us today, of a repressive shadow type requiring enhancedly-
organized recognition, which latter theme underlay our demonstration at Don and
Mark’s talk on the Radical Faeries. Our hope was and is that open discussion of the
psychological roots behind individual falseness in regard to key collective matters such
as the history of homosexual organizing, can lead to successful cultivation of a new gay
community morality upfrontly based on responsibly sought, gay-centered psychological
self-awareness.

I suspect that one of the main rationales behind Don’s unethical distortions may have to
do with what “political psychologist” Peter Dunlap calls “the fear of the future” in his
recent book, Faith in the Future: The Advent of Psychological Liberalism (2008).
Dunlap sees the next stage of political evolution as inciting each of us to face our
unconscious processes in a more ethical and rigorous way. He knights this new age,
“psychological liberalism,” to distinguish it from the now-passing era of “political
liberalism” heretofore predominant, which itself had been a considerable advance from
the previous stage of “religious liberalism” (and before that, the “group identity” of
“tribal liberalism,” and even earlier, the “mammalian” qualities of “social hierarchy”) in
so far as it endows individual subjectivity with unprecedented moral freedom and
parallel responsibility (2008, pp. 98-99).

Dunlap (2008) writes about the need for a new, self-aware breed of political leader who
“will be able to use emotions not only to assess psychological, political and moral
realities” but, he adds, who can employ “emotions to connect to and to motivate a new
constituency and a new social movement” (pp. 22-23) through enhanced psychological
consciousness. It does not require any leap of faith, so to speak, to apply Dunlap’s
analysis to specifically gay situations, and thus to use it as a magnifying lens to better
understand what has gone wrong with Don.

As far as I can tell from Don’s writings, he cannot rely expressively on any key emotion
other than bitterness, which he literarily acts from ad infinitum by castigationally
complaining over and over about how assimilationist and immature our movement is (I
agree that our movement is assimilationist and immature, but not to the one-sided
extent Don often harps on; there are, for example, benefits to assimilation and
immaturity that Don, in his perpetual failure to be dialectical, never insightfully
addresses). It would seem as if Don was in fact petrified of his own bigger emotions, a
sort of intimidating terror that can be seen more frankly speaking in some of his old
letters to Mitch, where one might observe him, for example, confess to drinking rather
than confronting the pain coming up in therapy.

During his now multi-year tenure writing a regular column for Frontiers, Don has only
once talked about his own feeling life and its problems, and that time about how, finding
himself to be “a carrier” of “The Great Father-Son Wound,” said difficulty “took much
growth in consciousness and deep inner work to heal” (Kilhefner, 2008). This singular
 
  17

 
confession comes in the subordinate clause of a much longer sentence, with no other
mention of this personal matter in the article, or any other article, to say nothing about
anything else regarding Don as an actual psychological being rather than a mere
objectifier and pontificator.

I might, furthermore, wager that this sole, hardly-generous and supposedly-authentic

personal “opening” came merely as the result of a public airing of Don’s perplexing and
consistent lack of emotional authenticity and psychological mindedness (given his
prominently self-professed role and moniker as gay-community Jungian psychologist,
therapist, etc.) at an educational presentation colleagues and I gave at the Los Angeles
Lesbian and Gay Psychotherapy Association Conference in June 2008, where we
deconstructed his writings, both to honor him (he is, after all, the only attemptedly gay-
centered, Jungian-minded movement figure out there besides those of us who work with
the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis), and to demonstrate how much
further we can go as a people than what is being intimated in his Hallmark Card
proclamations to Gay Youth, Adults, Elders and Ancestors (what Marcuse might call a
“caricature of dialectics” [1964, p. 89]). For his part, Don discusses homosexual issues
either in an imitative New Agey manner (he adores Eckhart Tolle, a real gay visionary if
there ever was one) or in a totally politically-extraverted way. He doesn’t consider any
actually-homosexual archetypes in the slightest (he couldn’t, as he would have to cite
Mitch’s work on the Double [Walker, 1976], for starters).

Also, Don never refers to anything the least bit erotic (in fact, he often shames the
erotic), and offers no practical and consistent road map as to how gays or lesbians could
actually work on themselves in a homosexually-centered, interiorly-focused fashion by
engaging unconscious processes through appropriately-reconfigured methods such as
self-confrontation and “active imagination” (a classical Jungian concept: duh). To be
fair, Don has mentioned writing down feelings and seeking out therapy, but such
occasional, simplistically-put advice often feels more like hectoring, and is never
actually framed in any gay-centering fashion. He does not point gay people either to
their numinous same-sex-loving eros or to their revolting gay inferiority based in the
trauma of heterosexist injury, nor to how persistent alchemical work on the latter
business increasingly leads to transpersonal transformations in relation to the realm of
the former (For an interesting gay-centered gloss on Don’s writings in this regard, see
Mitch Walker’s fairly close reading of his work in Gay Liberation at a Psychological
Crossroads, 2009; also see www.uranianpsych.org).

Additionally, Don’s writings, epitomized by his recent piece in the newly-edited

anthology, Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation
(Mecca, 2009), only reference a by-gone past as viable model for the gay future, and do
absolutely nothing to discuss any of the more authentically forward-oriented material
someone like political psychologist Dunlap, much less my colleagues and myself as gay-
centered psychotherapists efforting an ethically-new liberatory competence subjectively
and interpersonally, would discuss as crucially pertinent for better fulfilling the
important destiny of same-sex-loving peoples now. Don’s articulations of gay
psychology amount to nothing much but one-dimensional, disembodied abstractions;
they consistently fail at offering what Marcuse calls authentically real “two
dimensionality” (or “un-mutilated experiential context” [1964, p. 204]) in such ways as I
 
  18

 
have been pointing out, like the lack of dialectic or of any deep involvement with feeling.

Don’s words apparently aim progressively towards enhancement of the “good life” for us
gay people through being more so gay-centered. But such intimations are actually
wreathed in a nostalgia and manipulativeness that really point us backward to a pre-
psychological time, to the busy extravert life Don so enjoyably lived at the height of his
early gay political activism and to ideas he absorbed from Mitch and Harry when he
worked with them in the Faeries and Treeroots but that have been exploitatively
reduced to serving as a mere gloss on his underlying emotional motives. When Don tries
to realistically see into the future in his writings, it seems to me, his defenses only
boomerang him to prior times and sensibilities, but not even a past involving what really
occurred so much as one adjusted in his mind to better suit his present psychodynamic
needs.

In the state of political and individual oppression, “The functional language is a radically
anti-historical language,” adds Marcuse (1964, p. 98). It “fights against a dimension of
the mind in which centrifugal faculties and forces might develop” in relation to memory,
where richly acquired qualities might emancipatorily “hinder the total coordination of
the individual with the society” (p. 98).

To rub the point in further, I will again cite Peter Dunlap, who, being more of a
psychologist than Herbert Marcuse although strongly influenced by him, posits that
there are “three emergent capacities” required of competent leaders who are responding
to the crises of today (these being environmental degradation, abuse of power and the
psychological dilemmas of “depression, self-disgust, and loneliness”), abilities needed to
help them and us get beyond this enslaving type of mental one-dimensionality: (1) the
capacity for “generational attention” (which focuses our awareness on the crises of our
times); (2) “affect freedom” (or fluency with one’s emotions); and (3) the capacity for
destiny (to think about how the future is beckoning now) (Dunlap, 2008, pp. 11-13).

I would suggest that Don, at best, displays to some extent only the first emergent
capacity for futuristically competent leadership, in so far as he is at least trying to be
articulate about today’s big ideological crisis of gay-centeredness versus gay
assimilationism. But his generational attention dims when it comes to amplifying more
creatively what it means to be a Jungian who is gay-centered (nothing about the
problem of the gay shadow?; nothing about the same-sex soul figure as future emissary
between the ego and the collective unconscious?). He fails at demonstrating any affect
freedom at all, and is quite poor about developing his capacity for destiny (he mostly
complains). If we use Dunlap’s qualitative rubric about what pacesettingly constitutes
the new political psychologist, Don seems badly wanting indeed.

I believe these failures of insight which I have pointed out in Don’s supposed leadership,
are most likely sourced in fiercely-assertive psychological defenses (concerning a fear of
the past that leads to a fear of the future) which in turn emphatically determine Don’s
so-far fairly effective, community-wide embargo on Mitch and Mitch’s ideas of rigorous
psychological gay-centeredness and attendant homosexual emotional honesty, a
particularly ironic boycott in that Mitch’s considerations seem to me way more
authentically and fully gay-centered than any of Don’s, as well as being thus so deeply
 
  19

 
involved with both the gay shadow problem and the homosexual erotic as the electrically
numinous, royal road to fullest same-sex-loving self-realization. It never ceases to
amaze me that when faced with a choice between Don’s stale, sleazy and almost-asexual
avuncularism and Mitch’s innovatively queer and lively vision of romantic twinship love
as a perpetually-upwelling metaphor for introversionally enacting a homosexual sacred
marriage between the human and the divine, there would be any significant confusion
between relevant truth and falsehood in terms of the same-sex-loving contextual
situation relating to these two historical persons here at hand being looked at. But then
again, that such confusion is presently going on perhaps says something important
about the pernicious preponderance of internalized homophobia still badly infecting our
gay love and potential (more on this lingering psychological demon soon).

The New Frontiers of Gay Activism

As gay-centered psychological organizers, the members of the Gay Psyche Politics

Collective who have created this blog and the protest against Don and Mark last
February, regard the better-disciplined activation of the innate impulse in homosexual
subjectivity to authentically seek a deeply realized and libidinally embodied gay-
identified personhood, and the closely-related work involved in expeditively fostering a
maturationally-oriented gay community much more so capable than currently of
accurately prioritizing and interventionally facilitating such enhanced homosexual
individuation, as the most innovative, vital and important activist terrain facing any
ethical same-sex-loving person today.

In my opinion and experience, the coming out process with which all homosexuals are
familiar (and perhaps take for granted), entails but the first stage of subjective
alchemical initiation into full gay-identified self-realization. I believe there are further
stages (another possibility to which Don never alludes).

That is, “coming out” is experienced as a radicalizing emotional and cognitive

development by which a gay person, among other things, wakes up to how he or she has
been brainwashed by the family and society to negatively regard his or her same-sex-
loving essence. He or she is thereby increasingly released to better undertake that slow
but heroic effort of integrationally allying with an interior “gay knowing” which has been
and is ongoingly being autogenously consolidated from persistently yummy homosexual
feelings involving sex, love, fantasy and intimacy, an estimably salutary effort to
rewardingly reach a newly self-respecting, interior alliance in bold constitutional
contrast to that sad alienation which was unjustly based on what once seemed an
inevitably-ordained, homophobically heterosexist sensibility about such otherwise-good
amatory experiences. Through successfully attaining this inner reorientational point in
the empowering self-recovery process, a gay person begins building a sound and viable
self-identification with his or her venereal gay source that in turn not only constellates
as the sure sense of being a meaningfully valuable homosexual person but as such
becomes the sure developmental platform from which to improvedly come to know this
perpetually upwelling Homo-eros inside as a well-felt, and even “intelligently” felt and
awakening, presence of great numinous substantiality quite able to magically transport
him or her inductively into an even more marvelously-transmuting journey initiatorily
to compositionally become still better tangibly whole and self-realized as a meaningful
 
  20

 
homosexual human being—now on entirely different and healthier terms than those of
one’s heterosexist parents or society, on one’s own autochthonously-generated,
homosexually appreciative terms.

The process of gay identity formation individuationally operating in the appropriate

personal growth of a successfully functioning same-sex-loving individual is thus
conceived of as actually ongoing throughout the lifespan, as consisting in multiple stages
or degrees of authentic homosexual self-fathoming, of sincerely-fulfilling gay
personality-making, from birth to death. We same-sex-loving folk have only just, in
terms of this more modern and humanistic picture of contemporary gay psychology
pivotally informed by that subjective evolutionary phenomenon which therapist Carl
Rogers (1961) called “becoming a person,” begun to more seriously appreciate what it
can mean significationally to self and others to “come out” transformatively as gay
inside subjectivity to the deepest and most liberatory possibilities momentously
intimated by the revelatory notion of a greaterly-complete homosexual identity or
valuable personhood than presently humanely well-recognized.

In addition to the affirmative considerations of further gay personality development

looked at just above, the gay-centering attitude being illustratively followed out here
also then helps us better recognize important antagonists to stronger homosexual self-
actualization.

The enemy in our midst is not simply unjust laws and bigoted social institutions
themselves, although of course these external malefic factors are quite real, noxiously
inimical, and must be utterly vanquished. As psychological activists, however, I and my
associates engage an additional “front,” so to speak, in the necessary struggle against
cultural fascism. We train our eye on what might be considered an even more pernicious
enemy than bigoted social laws and customs. I refer here to the ideology of heterosexism
and accompanying homophobia now operating as a psychological principle or attitude,
what might be overarchingly referred to as “internalized heterosexism.”

From a gay-centered psychological activist point of view, the bad effects of noxious
heterosexism on a growing homosexual person work to destroy the present and future
gay mind in a variety of overt and covert ways, but I think this foul influence operates
most nefariously as we are forced by circumstances to unconsciously identify early on
with our heteronormative parental complexes (the psychic internalizations of mother
and father) over and against our indigenous Gay Spirit. From our parents’ point of view,
being gay is almost always seen as, at worse, a terrible sin or a bitter blow, and at better,
something alien to courteously tolerate or goodheartedly accept (but not, goddess
forbid, anything really important enough to actually celebrate for its own procreative
wonder, majesty and possibility!)

At the moment of this writing and as I think about the matter, two ways I can feel my
own internalized heterosexism trying to control me right now are: through ominously
fearing effective retribution for the strong, challenging stance I’m taking up here,
dreadedly imagining an overwhelming punishment by the sorcerously-powerful likes of
vengeful Don via his eager attack dog, Karen (What terrible dish might she have stored
up about me? That last trick I took home from Pavilions years ago?); and
 
  21

 
invalidationally wondering if I am actually being too cowardly in this discussion to
deserve to be taken seriously (one reason perhaps for my delay in responding to Karen’s
blog?). Now I find myself day-dreaming about going away on a cruise with a hot guy; am
I in reality here running away from both the burning relational fire of my homosexual
libido and the abysmal pain involved in recovering from how my parents and society
badly traumatized me for opening to the marvelous same-sex-loving passion erupting in
my emotions and my body? There certainly is a lot of disruptive affective provocation
being well privately invoked here by my act of trying to write effectively about
troublesome matters concerning the likes of Don and Karen! Why do I even have to
compose this assertive and challenging blog statement at all? Can’t I just be safely
normal and mindlessly live behind a white-picket fence like all acceptable people do?

For decades now, gay liberationists have diagnosed any form of homosexual self-
acceptance that superficializes, reduces or otherwise minimizes being gay as expressing
ambivalence toward full same-sex-loving emancipation. They have termed this
compromised position, “assimilationism.” Relatively constructive aspects of gay
assimilationist political effort would have us fighting for our social rights, including
marriage and military equality, yet fuller success in such conservatively-normalizing
ways could also lead in concert with continued thwarting of alternate gay social
developments to a new type of destructive homosexual collusion with contemporary
cultural “Nazis” to still render a good-enough “Final Solution” on being importantly gay
through situationally enforced, mass forms of reactionary integrationist dilution.

The scariest thing I find about today’s increasingly ideologically-neutered gay

community politics is that hardly anybody at all seems even slightly interested in the
concept much less practice of being gay-centered, such that it would accordingly appear
as if dissipationally compromising assimilationism perhaps has already pretty fully won
out as our liberational movement’s overarching goal.

I would even go so far as to say that the apparent domination of such integrationist
ideology aptly there so symptomatizes the most egregious mental health problem we
gays contemporaneously face, when we consider how it might be reflecting a limitational
devaluation of much greater possibilities in same-sex-loving personhood that is
deleteriously sourced in powerful forms of covert self-hatred, toxic shame and other
rotten consequences of still-foully-internalized homophobia. In regard to this
confounding problem of the lasting injuriousness of vicious social victimization to the
victims, I might note that ACT UP co-founder Larry Kramer has often made poignant
analogies (e.g., Kramer, 1994) between what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany and
gays during the AIDS health crisis; the Jews were so identified with their abusers that
they did not notice they were being asked to contribute to their “Final Solution” until the
doors to the cargo trains shut once and for all. As we know from the renowned scholar
Hannah Arendt (1976) as well as through its reference by Larry Kramer, the Final
Solution could only have successfully taken place with significant Jewish cooperation.

Ironically enough, among the worst colluders (who could also be known as “Kapos”) of
today’s gay assimilationism as a strategic tool for helping eliminate what is actually a
currently-rising cultural threat—due to the increased validational success of the modern
gay liberation movement—of a fuller, more so politically-revolutionary homosexual self-
 
  22

 
realization occurring on a large social scale, in my estimation, are some of the gay
activist leaders who seem most vocal in outwardly decrying assimilation, notably here,
Don Kilhefner, Mark Thompson and, as their sycophantic propagandist, Karen Ocamb. I
would argue that Don, Mark and Karen are misbehaving ethically in a deeply self-
compromising fashion in assertively taking up their conscious positions on the
importantly-problematic matters herein being explored, matters such as Don’s
coldblooded historical mutilations and Mark’s smarmy cooperation therewith, and as a
result wind up amounting significationally to little more than anti-gay wolves in fey
sheeps’ clothing. Those supposedly high-minded community people who act immorally
in such a noxious duplicitous fashion are certainly not in the end helping us same-sex-
loving folk live a better gay-centered life. They may promotionally claim to gaily walk
their talk, but then they point away to some vague or even opposite direction, ultimately
to a direction subliminally vitiating if not more overtly self-destructively heterosexist, as
I hope to further show through a close reading of Karen’s blog, now to follow.

 
  23

 
Part II: The Karen Ocamb Situation

First, the Article

Despite the fact that Karen Ocamb had seemed friendly when she saw me at the
aforementioned One Archives demonstration protesting Don and Mark’s “take” on the
Faeries which she was attending (I waved gaily—“Hi, Karen!”), if the negatively slanted
tone of her consequent Feb. 24 Frontiers in L.A. article about the protest is any
indication, she was certainly not the least bit impressed by the protestors’ cheeky
chants, such as “Faeries cannot harmonize, distorting truth and spreading lies,” or by
the parodistic posters we were carrying, one of which equated Mark and Don with
Barbara Bush and Dick Cheney, respectively.

Indeed, her article seems quite biased against the demonstration and me in particular,
starting with its blunt title, “Radical Faeries Talk Marred by Protests,” and going on to
single out, of all the 15-30 folks total who protested at any one point, only my name, and
indeed, it was the very first time Karen has ever called me “Dr. Doug Sadownick of the
LGBT specialization in clinical psychology at Antioch University in Los Angeles.” To
make matters more intense for me, there was a reference after the article to her personal
blogsite entry about the incident, “Who’s History? My Curious Encounter with the
Radical Faeries,” (http://www.bilerico.com/2009/02/whos_history_my_curious_
encounter_with_t.php), which contained outrageous attacks against me and some
friends in the context of her frank confession that she had been secretly nursing a big
private grudge against me for over 15 years.

I want to spend the bulk of this part of my blog statement addressing hers, but I can’t
help but first say a few words about her “objective” journalism in the Frontiers piece,
the only publically-appearing description of the protest event that I am aware of. In it,
she leaves out any mention of the goodly educational aspect to the lively action we were
undertaking, and then gives additional indications of a prejudice against the gay-
centered ideas involved by consistently focusing animosity on the people demonstrating.
She uses selective words to suggest, in line with the attitude of those being protested
against, that the objectors were merely trying to provoke a petulant and petty argument
about who deserves to have bragging rights over founding the Radical Faerie movement
by unreasonably complaining that Don and Mark were simply “erasing” Mitch, a
trivialistic charge she easily then refutes by citing Don in the hall mentioning Mitch in
his account. She ends by saying that some protestors who were inside then persistently
“angrily shouted at Kilhefner,” another darkening mischaracterization which, it seems to
me, allusively casts more aspersion on the demonstration versus conjuring some
modicum of objective comprehension about it (instead implicitly eliciting sympathy only
for badly put-upon Don and Mark).

Most interestingly, she supports the distorted history involved in the situation. She
writes:

Inside, Kilhefner talked about how Walker and Harry Hay discussed the idea for
what became the Radical Faeries—a gathering where gay men could talk and
discover their authentic gay identities in an idyllic setting. But after a blow up
 
  24

 
with Hay, Walker left the organizing meeting, and Hay and Kilhefner completed
and carried out plans for what became a worldwide movement.

But we know from our previous exploration in Part I of this statement that the above
reported account by Don is a deceitful distortion. No such Mitch “blow up” resignation
prematurely ended his participation, and he was quite involved with the rest until Don
joined with him in the Faerie schism of 1981 to create Treeroots. Karen makes it seem as
if Mitch was a big baby. She makes a lot of things seem like something else. She makes
the Faeries seem “idyllic,” when, as we know from Don’s letters to Mitch, they were not.

Of all the protestors who were present at Don and Mark’s presentation, it was decided
by Karen to name only me: “About 15 protesters, including therapist Dr. Doug
Sadownick of the LGBT specialization in clinical psychology at Antioch University in Los
Angeles, held signs outside the ONE parking lot blasting Kilhefner.” My guess is that she
fingered me because, on the surface, I am the most publically-notable person who
attended the demonstration, what with my position at the university and my history as a
gay community journalist, author and co-founder of Highways Performance venue, but
underneath perhaps Karen was maliciously trying with her selective maneuver to cause
me to lose my academic job through the promotion of disparaging notoriety, a not so
unlikely possibility when one considers the bile Karen confesses to in her blog
statement, and if such a nasty maneuver was indeed being attempted, it would then
provide a good example of Jungian Erich Neumann’s notion of the sadistically
retaliatory, scapegoating manner in which the totalitarian old ethic attempts to
repressively and viciously control individual psychology from the inside out as well
orchestrated from the outside in, through the now-neurotic and hopefully disruptive
fear of being ruinously slammed by serious character defamation. Political philosopher
Herbert Marcuse, as we know, calls the underlying form of thought-control guiding such
righteous-appearing enactments of threat and disempowerment “one-dimensional
thinking,” which there so terroristically operationalizes the “closing of the universe of
discourse” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 84) to better liberatory possibilities. He decries its
especially pernicious quality in reproducing “the one-dimensional man [sic], the
enforcer of totalitarianism in modern times” (p. 43).

Then, The Blog—A Short Summary

Karen’s blog commentary on the One Archives protest starts off by saying that “I don’t
do gossip,” but then she goes on to say that she’s “had an itch to tell a particular story,”
one in which she is personally involved. She introduces the “Players,” who include Harry
and then Don, and how she came to know Harry (“I’d see this tall, skinny old man who
always wore bead necklaces and flowery hippie-type shirts at different ACT UP and
Queer Nation demonstrations”). She tries to define the Radical Faerie concept: “The
basic idea was to explore gay soul and gay identity, springing off the creative work of gay
men such as Walt Whitman and Edward Carpenter.” This is the only place in her
statement where she evidences any historical interest other than that motivated by her
own vindictiveness.

At this point, she introduces knowing me, and that I was “partnered with performance
artist Tim Miller,” that we’d come to ACT UP demonstrations, that I wrote for the LA
 
  25

 
Weekly for some years and was “skewing or creating details to enhance a story” in ways
or instances which she never specifies. She then proceeds to talk about “Michael Callen’s
Last Days.” (Michael Callen was a famous singer, activist, writer and beloved movement
figure who succumbed to AIDS in 1993, and with whom I grew quite close over several
years, so much so that I became his primary caregiver during the dying process). Karen
says she “signed up with Doug” at some point to help with Michael. She then describes
how she and Michael subsequently bonded deeply such that she gratifyingly officiated
over an emotionally healing, death-bed reunion with his biological family as he lay
expiring, of which event I did not approve when I then later heard about it from her
such that I responded by meanly yelling at her. Karen details this latter story in a section
entitled, “Doug Sadownick’s Scream,” where she entertains for a millisecond the
possibility that I might have had a point in confronting her, only to summarily dismiss
that notion. She clearly was powerfully disturbed by this heated emotional encounter
between us (I actually didn’t remember the situation with the same potency, and
consequently had been flummoxed about why Karen had seemed friendly yet so distant
these many years—a dissociation on my part? Or a state of being nonplussed due to
resentment-filled insincerity on her part? A combination of the two?).

She subsequently goes on to add that the death of Michael and the coincidental
Northridge earthquake “triggered an emotional breakdown from all the unprocessed
grief,” which was then much helped by Don Kilhefner, who told her that she was on a
“spiritual quest,” which Karen says gave her “a positive way to contextualize the
overwhelming darkness” (Don evidently didn’t talk to her about how her
“overwhelming” feelings could have been ultimately sourced in her having been badly
imposed on from infancy by heterosexism and other terrible influences; okay, maybe
befriending the crushed-little-girl-inside-of-us isn’t for everyone, no?).

She then discusses “The Mitch Walker Connection,” where she starts by noting that her
“awareness of Doug resurfaced in 1998,” when she heard from Harry that Mitch and “his
own little band of followers—including Doug“ were now “viciously attacking” Harry. She
additionally says that she knew Mark Thompson was also having trouble with Mitch, me
and other “member[s] of Mitch’s clan,” such that Mark was “being inundated with nasty
letters attacking his character” by this ill-intentioned “small group,” members of which
then showed up at a local bookstore reading for his new work (Gay Body, 1997) and
“shouted ‘shadow’ questions” at him such that he became “so frightened” he had to be
“hastily snuck out the back” by two friends. Karen thought, here were “some jerks
making nuisances of themselves,” but later on she found that the matter persistently
“gnawed” at her because “Clearly, they had so terrorized Mark...that [it] essentially
killed his book career.” Concludingly, Karen indicates that I, Mitch and friends were and
are no less scary than the “White Aryan Resistance” from whom she and a lawyer
associate had earlier in her activist career suffered some awful intimidation, yet, “I
wasn’t afraid of a handful of screaming therapists,” she says she told Mark and Harry
when they warned her about the dangerous “little band” of Mitch and “his followers,” to
which brave proclamation of hers they alarmedly responded, “They’ll come after your
dogs.” That “gave me pause.” She also notes that Don had called us “cult-like.”6

 
  26

 
More Lies (Or the Conquest of Unhappy Consciousness)

Karen explains her refusal to cover in a timely manner the quite newsworthy fact of the
creation in Los Angeles of the country’s first academic LGBT graduate specialization in
clinical psychology and that I had been named its founding director, a project she
further demeans in her blog statement by making it only about me (“When Doug
contacted me about doing a story on his new endeavor—he had a Ph.D. now—I balked”),
through the claim that she was privately still too upset about the Michael Callen
screaming imbroglio to be objective, and thus she’d “have to recuse myself from
anything related to Doug Sadownick” (An article on the Specialization in Frontiers not
by Karen did appear about a year after its start).

Here she is confusing me (actually, the image in her mind of me) with an important,
even historical gay landmark with which I was (and still am) involved, the pioneering
Antioch program, a censorious pattern she repeats as well with what in my opinion is an
even more significant project, the first legitimate organization that I am aware of in the
world devoted to disciplined research and professional education about estimable
homosexual personhood, the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis,
currently in its fifth year of innovational operation. She seemingly forgets that I also
phoned her regularly about Institute monthly talks and lectures. She furthermore adds,
“I think I did a brief on his new LGBT Specialization psychology class.” By again
reductively alluding to the Antioch project as “his...class,” she also keeps minimizing
what the university faculty and I were trying to ambitiously do collectively in trailblazing
that novel educational and training domain (for example, we developed a competent
LGBT-affirmative curriculum vetted by the University and an assembled Advisory
Board, a roster of affirmative instructors, a Community Partners Board, national
funders, and working alliances with groups as diverse as the L.A. Gay and Lesbian
Center, Division 44 of the American Psychological Association, the Southern California
Lesbian and Gay Psychotherapy Association, and LA Unified School District’s Project
Ten, etc.), all of which I had been sharing with Karen when it was being organizationally
established.

She adds, “for the most part, I shuttled everything over to the features and calendar
editors—which was actually appropriate since therapy-related stories are more ‘lifestyle’
than news, anyway.”

Not true: She actually has written quite a lot about “lifestyle” issues when they were in
her opinion newsworthy. As she herself later puts it in her statement, “I've written about
Harry and about Don's more recent efforts” journalistically in addition to composing “an
advancer for IN Los Angeles magazine” on Don’s behalf. In addition, she reported in
some detail on last year’s West Hollywood Gay Men’s Forum, which I had a big role in
organizing and participating in, and which was an event oriented completely around
“lifestyle.” Her report, by the way, left out any mention of my own involvement and the
very successful panel presentation I set up and moderated, which had to do with the
importance of gay-affirmative psychotherapy in the lives of gay men—a breakthrough
topic in a community generally antsy about publically broaching notions such as gay
therapy and gay shadow.

 
  27

 
Marcuse diagnoses the kind of morally-compromised gay culture being attemptedly
created by the likes of Don Kilhefner and Karen Ocamb as only seemingly progressive,
because as viewed from both his perspective and our more gay-centered one, it would
certainly amount to an unfortunate “desublimation” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 56)—a
dangerous regression. The “failures of this society,” Marcuse writes in terms of the
problem more broadly, “invalidate its higher culture. The celebration of the autonomous
personality, of humanism, of tragic and romantic love appears to be the ideal of a
backward stage of the development” through which it has actually come in terms of the
oppressive loss produced by one-dimensionalizing reification. Marcuse could be as well
describing what happens to the gay liberation movement when it backslides
hypocritically into assimilationist de-gayification due in significant part to those self-
selected people who (modestly of course!) deem themselves out of reactionary psychic
motives the most homosexually moral and/or avant-garde. The highest gay calling in
Karen’s blog narration is happy reunion with one’s biological parents, and, as I
discussed earlier, Don’s supposedly ground-breaking ruminations amount mainly to
platitudes, complaints and nostalgia. Writes Marcuse, “what is happening now is not the
deterioration of higher culture into mass culture but the refutation of this [more
sophisticated] culture by reality” (p. 56), a now-manufactured or at least well-laundered
“reality.”

More Attacks, More Liquidation

Karen spends the rest of her blog statement attacking the protestors (and Mitch Walker,
the imputed Svengali behind these troublemakers), for example giving hell to activist
Wendell Jones for trying to talk about how Don and Mark seemed to be, as she quotes
Wendell, “asking to be confronted about the distortions, manipulations and abuse of
power they have actually been maliciously generating for a long time” (see “Original
Protest Announcement” in the March archives of this blog, which Wendell had emailed
to Karen prior to the demonstration).

She makes fun of Wendell’s psychological articulations (“OK—so Don and Mark are
‘asking to be confronted?’ Abuse of what power?”) by referring to her inner college
psychology textbook to then professorially suggest that Wendell “seems to be doing his
own projecting” onto Don and Mark, who she sees as “two gentle human beings” (she
must not have gotten whipped–or fisted!—by Mark at any time over the last several
decades!). She also mocks Wendell’s concern that Mitch’s gay-centered psychological
vision is being made to disappear by making the concern only about Mitch the person
(“Let Mitch write his own book”).

She also deprecatingly criticizes Mitch for himself not attending the demo (suggesting
hypocrisy), and for not having contacted her about an advance piece (“If Mitch thinks
that his views should be the basis for the next phase of gay liberation, why hasn’t he
approached me to write a story on that?”). She again confuses personality issues with
larger matters. Who said Mitch had to be at the demonstration? And, about the bigger
picture, I approached Karen myself many times by phone and email to raise such sorts
of more-encompassing concerns, but her hidden bias against gay-centered psychological

 
  28

 
ideas kept her from dealing with any real news that could have been at hand. She had no
interest.

She now has the temerity to ask, “What’s Mitch afraid of?” Talk about projection. And
then she unleashes her authority complex, “And what gives him—or his followers—the
right to tell me about my goddamn ‘shadow’...when I have not asked for his ‘help,’ thank
you very much.” As if anyone were talking to her in the first place.

Karen concludes her piece by saying that Don “had no idea what all the racket was
about” regarding the protest, that he had personally confided “his truth” to her, about
how “he was there and Mitch didn’t play as significant a role as his followers were
suggesting,”7 and that Harry and Mitch “had a big fight and Mitch left—leaving Harry
and Don to do the actual organizing.” Not an ounce of what this supposedly-
disingenuous reportage is delivering is factually transparent, as I illustrated above—
indeed, from all appearances until this relatively sudden demur from Don, he worked
quite amiably with Mitch in founding the Faeries and then bonded with him even more
tightly to decisively break from Harry!

Finally, Karen also bemoans the fact that the “folks in the audience” could not find out
about their history due to the screaming protestors, that “Instead they were treated to a
confrontation by perennially petulant Peter Pans who seem to delight in tearing down
others—in the name of therapy.”

Unfinished Family Business and Emotional Scapegoating

I think Karen’s mean attack against anything and anyone I am involved with is
powerfully related to a very big resentment she has been holding for a long time against
me personally. Why this private outrage of such a long-standing, bitter nature? She
herself points to the answer, which has to do with how she felt deeply hurt by that
reputedly too-hot action of mine such that “I have been estranged from Doug
Sadownick” due to the Michael Callen screaming incident. She adds that she has since
“avoided Doug and the people he hung out with.” In reality, she has been badly stewing
about it for more than 15 years, and moreover has been waiting for a good time to
vengefully vent in public this festering upset (“I've had an itch to tell a particular story
for some time now—but because I'm personally involved, it never seemed appropriate”).
She connects to the fact that this unresolved hurt-and-rage has colored her ability to
report on important gay-centering developments taking place in our community. This
strikes me as admitting to the disgraceful, long-term acting out of a terrible journalistic
bias.

My working hypothesis about this big grudge is that Karen is conveniently hung up on
feeling ongoingly hurtfully enraged at me as a needed dodge to safely avoid dealing with
why it really bothers her so badly, why such a nettlesome resentment could be actually
more-importantly sourced, maybe unrecognized, in some of her own unresolved worst
feelings, perhaps about her own biological parents.

 
  29

 
The meanspirited nastiness of her words and actions itself suggests such an interior
psychodynamic accounting, as this underhanded kind of over-reactive adult vehemence
is all too typically symptomatic of an emotionally badly-thwarted childhood, in my
experience, and points to the urgent grassroots need for much more realistic strategies
to effectively identify and address influential psychological factors related to the public
good than stewing, holding grudges, acting out passive-aggressive envy by twisting
history, disavowing of the problem through venomous blaming, and committing
character assassination, as well as other nefarious forms of moral rape.

Writes political psychologist Dunlap: “The new psychological consciousness I am

imagining could be harnessed to support individuals and groups to use their emotions
‘reflexively’ to activate foundational and emergent human capacities” (2006, p. 61). It is
time, his book avers, to cultivate better psychological growth as the only effective form
of politics available to us today.

Personal Limitations

A close reading of her blog narrative shows that Karen’s disparagement of me and my
colleagues as “perennially petulant Peter Pans who seem to delight in tearing down
others” is more realistically the projective acting out of her own, perhaps inwardly-
dissociated, perpetual eagerness to be nastily “tearing down others.” After all, she
mentions her “spiritual quest” only once in brief passing, as she keeps heaping on the
scorn and mockery. Indeed, we learn nothing about anyone’s “spiritual quest” in her
blog, only about other people’s bad sides (excepting for Don and Mark, who are merely
so “gentle”). It seems to me that her dark enthusiasm espouses no positive vision,
nothing redemptive, no way out of confusion or disillusionment, but what the German
philosopher Frederich Nietzsche saw as that “slave revolt in morality” (Nietzsche,
1887/1969, p. 36) which took place when Christian values won out over Greco-Roman
ones during the last two millennia, consequently contaminating people’s psychologies
with a debilitating “ressentiment” (p. 38), a draining “great nausea” (p. 96) and
preoccupational “bad conscience” (p. 95) which only enabled their deeper subjugation
by unjust social power. A regressive judging and shaming compulsion of the
ressentiment-sort appears to misdirectively inform Karen’s gay work and life, I would
say from going through her comments.

When I first heard about Karen’s blog posting, I had a strongly-negative feeling reaction,
in which my psychodynamic “inner parents” in the form of infantilely originated
“complexes” provocationally fired up their critical self-attacks, fiercely castigating me
for going to the demonstration in the first place, for ill-consideredly risking so much for
so little, for being worthless as a person anyway, thereby meanly trying to sufficiently
shame me into then defeatedly retreating to that pathetic den of impotent cowardice
where I had hidden so much of the time as a child (and had I kept to the advice of these
caricaturish parental figures, which I would never even have tried to escape at all!).

I also experienced myself emotively polarizing strongly against Karen, angrily feeling
quite effectively hurt by her intended malice and subsequently thinking that she was
now accordingly revealed as a vicious enemy whom I had to try to destroy back at least
in kind or else be even more terribly smashed, which hateful reactive impulse, on
 
  30

 
account of my persistently partnering the related feelings and dedicatedly addressing
the big concerns of those feelings directly inside since then, I do not anymore hold
would at all make for a worthwhile venture.

The Question of Validity

I now sense a problem at this point in my argument, which is that it would appear my
discussion of the situation, no matter how valid it may seem to me and others who agree
with me, still and all espouses just one view among other equally-legitimate options
concerning the points here at hand. Having admitted this, I also must say that there are
fair ways for an honest reader to assess for the relative presence/absence of
truthfulness, general “rules of thumb,” so to speak, that can help to reasonably weigh, in
the midst of contradictory testimonies, whether one perspective could be more honest or
accurate, if not more life-affirming, than another.

One such rule of thumb is to see if the logic of the argument internally holds up. Another
is to see if a given argument includes the other side’s perspective: is it attempting to be
fair-minded or does it enact polarized, black/white thinking, which is dehumanizing?
Another important indicator as to the presence of what could be considered a legitimate
dialectic in any argumentative discussion (meaning, an argument that is really going
somewhere), is whether or not the reader can feel or sense the presence of healthy
shame, as distinct from toxic shame, in the discussant’s voice. Political psychologist
Peter Dunlap talks about healthy shame, or the faculty for appropriate self-modesty, as
providing us with the ability to access diverse “emotions reflexively to activate
foundational and emergent human capacities,” as helping us see past our own
narcissistic injuries to appreciate how “emotions function to connect people to each
other, to a shared image of the future, and to mutual action” (2006, p. 35).

One way to look at my effort here is that, through attempting to connect with my healthy
shame by appropriately owning important relevant aspects of my own feelings and
issues, I am thereby mounting a larger-framed dialogue with Karen’s less-dimensional
statement in progressive regard to powerfully-pertinent issues which have long needed
such better addressing theoretically and politically; she is, in a way, reaching out to me
through the mean-hearted expression of her dark emotions in order, wittingly or not, to
situationally help “activate foundational and emergent human capacities,” as Dunlap
puts it, to there so dialectically contribute to effectively developing a new “shared image
of the future” not yet coherently present but needed, even though there is so much one-
sided toxic shaming, so much defensive violence on her part in this larger progressive
endeavor.

The Relationship

Karen repeatedly indicates in her blog narrative that after her big scene with me, we had
little interaction with one another. This is quite untrue. She doesn’t acknowledge that
not only have I spoken with her many times over those 15 years, often substantially, and
have sent her a variety of pertinent materials, but that Treeroots and then the Institute
for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis, in which I have been significantly involved,
have mailed and emailed Frontiers, In Magazine, and now Frontiers in L.A., all of
 
  31

 
which Karen has prominently worked at for decades, hundreds of descriptive
announcements of their events during that time. I called her on a variety of occasions to
try to talk about the larger themes of my gay-centered psychological activism. We
actually had at least a dozen or so long conversations over the years, usually about items
she wanted to address, particularly those related to her manic compulsion to be “that
journalist” always on deadline, always writing efficiently and effectively about the
extraverted world of political issues and civil rights struggles.

I also made sure to invite her to be part of the LGBT Specialization Advisory Board, to
which she attentively responded via email (2-9-07) this way: “Thanks for the invitation
to join your Board but I must respectfully decline” due to the generic problem of
“conflict of interest” as a reporter potentially having to report on something she was
otherwise herself involved in. But she then said she would be “happy to receive” updates
and furthermore that she’d “be open to that lunch you talked about a while ago. Perhaps
we can set up some time” soon. Yet despite many entreaties on my part, there never was
any such lunch.

But we did talk! When that happened, she would sometimes go on for almost an hour,
never once asking anything about myself, not to mention not having the courage to in
any way indicate that she was in any significant manner upset with me, much less that it
was on the massive scale her February blog revelation has now disclosed. And I did
warmly invite her over to my house for lunch, repeatedly over the years. True, I never
said, as I now wish I had, “gee, Karen, I am feeling, due to the fact that you have never
covered the Institute, and have only tangentially covered the LGBT Specialization, that
there may be some bad blood between the two of us. I have no idea what that could be
since you seem openly friendly to me, but I would be more than happy to explore the
matter with you.”

I am sorry that my own toxic shame may have gotten in the way of directly “cutting to
the chase” with Karen. But for a long time, I had no clear idea what the matter was, and
only began to hear that there was a controversy between Karen and me over the last year
through the grapevine. I wish I had been better sensitively humane with her in the last
decade and a half. But I came close, making sure to do what I could to cultivate her
interest in the new frontier of gay-centered psychology as manifesting in the work of the
Uranian Institute and the Antioch LGBT Specialization. I begged her to cover the Felice
Picano reading we once were doing at the Specialization. She actually had promised me
that she was going to come, but she never showed up.

To be sure, one way or another it must be so that a big aspect of the dilemma around me
and Karen can still be traced to my own shadow dynamics. In my opinion Karen and I
have a relationship that I have not fully honored. One could say that to some extent I
objectificationally “used” her to help out with Michael, and once the project was over, I
did what I have done in the past when my mother complex created a feeling of
suffocation in the setting of any conceivable interpersonal closeness: I spit her out.
Considering that it seems possible I did indeed scream at her, even strongly, wouldn’t it
have been more “humane” had I more so tried to process with her what my and her
feelings and reactions could have been? As the main caregiver in the Michael Callen
saga, I should have arranged a better “closure” for all the caretakers, of whom Karen was
 
  32

 
an important figure. I would have done so if it were today, but back then I had not yet
been initiated well enough into dealing with my own icky shadow relations, and was in
some ways unconsciously pretty wobbly. With the ongoing help of therapy and friends,
especially those at the Institute who regularly “fry” me, often publicly and quite lovingly,
for still untamed narcissism, I am of the considered opinion that I have grown to a
certain degree and integrated some of those violent gay shadow issues sourced in my
own infantile poisoning from a suffocating heterosexist regime, though I also admit that
I still have a ways to go in this improvemental direction!

Of course, one could hope that Karen would be more so a grown-up here herself and not
stoop to cheaply demonizing my prior actions, but instead to fairly consider trying to
contextualize the possibly gay-centering and even dignified reasons for my screaming at
her, if I did indeed do so. But Karen seems to be a staunch enemy to gay-centeredness,
as I will show, and to gay-centered psychology in particular. Before I tell my “Michael
Callen story,” I’d like to take one more digression in the next two sections to define what
is meant by “gay-centeredness” and to describe its worst kind of enemy.

Gay-Centered Philosophy

Without a gay liberation movement based in a richly informative gay-centered wisdom

tradition and attendant worldview (alive-and-well, although few on the street know
about this vitalizing library of homosexual mystical knowledge), we would not today be
able to value or experience gayness as an estimable phenomenon distinct from the
heterosexual.8

In this regard we owe, actually, a great founding debt to ancient Plato and the homo-
centric way he so memorably answered the classic questions as to what constitutes the
Good, the Just and the Eternal. And let’s not forget Sappho, and how her lesbian-loving,
Aphrodite-adoring sensate-singing always seems profoundly related to identity-making
and self-realization, an inspiring point about how it is that lesbian love and individuality
are two sides of the same coin in Sappho, as taught to me by the late lesbian-centered
psychotherapist/activist Sandra Golvin. This ancient naming of archetypal same-sex
love by the likes of Plato and Sappho as fundamentally distinct from all others for its
spiritualizing and personhooded qualities sets the stage for a gay-centered philosophy of
being gay that has been the leitmotif not just of our own, same-sex-loving lineage but
also, in the form of the overall drive for discrete subjective personhood, that of Western
Civilization altogether to a certain significant extent. Plato endowed same-sex
procreation with its own spiritualizing Goddess, Aphrodite Urania, saying this fecund
amativity was the true source from which sprang culture, art and philosophy in general,
and homosexual self-realization in particular.

These gay-centered, “Uranian” Platonic motifs were then amplified in one ecstatic form
or other by the Neo-Platonists of the later ancient and medieval Western worlds, as well
as by the Muslim Sufis, and also, then, by the trouble-making
homosexuals/alchemists/scholars who fomented the radical developments of individual
being and becoming called Humanism, followed by those of the European Renaissance,
all paving the way for the eighteenth century Enlightenment, which saw the first public
separation of religious “faith” from logical “reason,” and then the subsequent period of
 
  33

 
emotional growth on the basis of that new division, called Romanticism (which paved
the way for the parallel and cross-pollinating emergence of modern feminism, gay
liberation and psychoanalysis). Both the sense of an autarchic personal identity and a
self-referencing, same-sex-loving freedom movement, among other such interconnected
phenomena, can be seen to start coming of age, then, as related evolutionary
culminations of our ancient forebears’ early homo-centric sensibility, in such bold works
as that of Friedrich Nietzsche, with his erotic same-sex image of the overman of greater
individuating consciousness, Zarathustra (Nietzsche, 1892/1966; also see Nietzsche,
1882/1974, 1886/1989, 1908/1967; also see Kaufmann, 1974), on the one hand,9 and on
the other, the more emphatically homosexual work of roughly-contemporaneous
authors such as American poet Walt Whitman (“Song of Myself”; “Calamus”
[1881/1996]), British sociologist and mystic Edward Carpenter (Intermediate Types
[1914/2008]) and German lawyer Karl Ulrichs, the first public gay political activist, who
gave his life fighting for the rights of “Uranians,” as he called us starting in the 1860s
(see Ulrichs, 1898/1994), an “out” homosexual tradition that formationally then moves
into contemporary gay male terms by way of people like ex-Marxist Harry Hay and now
psychologist Mitch Walker (a legacy I pointed out earlier being named by Don Kilhefner
in one of his letters to Mitch!).

This historic depth based on the recurring transcendental substantiality inherent to

being what today we generally call “gay,” based on that incredibly yummy orgasmic stuff
we feel when we fall in love or cum with another person of the same sex (or while
fantasying of another such person), especially when persistently and consistently
undergone: that’s what gay-centeredness is all about. Gay-centeredness means to
prioritize and focus on homosexual experience, value and possibility, to align with a
same-sex-loving point of view in the face of its continuous captivating enunciation, in
particular to seek accordance with the perspective of Gay Spirit, the fundamental
archetypal inspiration to specifyingly form an abiding homosexual romantic orientation
to erotic adult love. Purposefully seeking to cultivate overall a better gay-centered
attitude and approach helps to more tangibly engage this most flavorful same-sex-loving
essence, or homosexual “god-energy,” inherently resident inside our increasingly
receptive, inseminating feeling life to its furthest accessible reaches, helps to
refreshingly and rejuvenatingly discover in a more tangible and conscious sense that
numinous divinity transpersonally available within the vital experience of homosexual
essentiality which primordially “turns us on” to begin with, makes us fall passionately in
queer love to top it all off, and moreover then provokes us to risk terrifying social
sanction in order to viably “come out” and live honestly as self-respecting same-sex-
loving people. Gay-centered theory and practice is all about bringing this generous
spiritualizing and personalizing homosexuality out of its centuries’-long hiding place
and enhancedly enabling its fabulously tasty fruit to again satisfyingly ripen in its own
safely-autogenous habitat, the habitat of one’s own living gay soul.

Gay and Lesbian Child Development and the Problem of Assimilation

From the affirming perspective I am here focusing on, then, the serious and sustained
attempt to better be gay-centered ideologically and feelingly affords gay-identified
people a potent tool or practice to expeditiously help ourselves advantageously align
more accurately and satisfyingly with our sourceful gay essence, and thereupon
 
  34

 
participate more so as a functional co-partner in its better lifespan actualization both
within the inner world and in relation to the outer as well. Logically speaking, it would
then seem, without an intrinsic sensibility to be gay-centered, we could not significantly
evolve or individuate in a gay way individually or collectively to begin with or any
further, we could only stay pretty well undifferentiated for the most part in the
heterosexist group mentality. So one can say that assimilationism is the attempt to undo
being gay-centered.

In the more psychoanalytical and Jungian terms of interior personal life, the gay shadow
problem heavily induced by longterm heterosexist oppression most importantly
concerns a noxiously-lingering sense of valuational inferiority as gay foundationally
arising from how the evolving proto-homosexual baby was inevitably mis-“handled”
literally and emotionally from its early caring environment on, first “pre-Oedipally” by a
heterosexistically-trained mothering figure.

Gay psychologists Alan Blum and Van Pfetzing (1997) say that every child who
accordantly grows up to become gay-identified unfortunately experiences a terrible
psychic assault to the nascent self from homophobic parents incapable of aptly
mirroring the various layers of particular emotional need emitting from such a queer
child, thereby provoking massive levels of dissociation in that child akin to what victims
of sexual trauma suffer from, with parallel later consequences.

Then there is the Oedipal challenge of middle childhood dramatically entailed in the
already-traumatized gay youngling’s emergent formation of an unselfaware libidinous
attachment endogenously to the same-sex parent, who most likely is feeling
implicitly/explicitly homophobic towards any such erotic-romantic childish interest.
One bad trauma then gets overlaid on top of another.

Once becoming an adult, it is possible to constructively differentiate these trauma layers

inside by learning to listen carefully to the intimate feelings of one’s wounded gay
shadow self. It is furthermore possible to then personify and follow these layered
childhood feelings on a resolutionary descent to the difficult personal underworld, there
to effortfully engage in a restorational dialogue dialectically with crushed and banished
“part-selves” entailing nurtured empathy, probing exposure and thorough processing.
Herein, if one can open up sincerely and participatorily enough, one undergoes an
emancipatory death from the scapegoating grip of heretofore toxic self-feelings and the
noxious, one-dimensional, heterosexist thought arising therewith, followed by a
transmuting alchemical rebirth into a dynamically-expanded, gay erotic consciousness,
basis of a successful social life as a relatively sound and loving homosexual person, and
which can then salutarily lead to even additionally-enhanced subjective homosexual
developments throughout the full lifespan and possibly even beyond.

But who can productively descend this homosexually-assertive way purposefully and
consciously without sufficient reasonable help, such as without seriously-enough
embracing a gay-centered theory and practice?

No wonder Karen is so upset with me for energetically confronting her, if her truly best-
upheld loyalty indeed lies in the self-betraying alignment of toxic shame I would argue
 
  35

 
her blog discussion reveals. Still, it is too bad that she takes her big shame and
consequent enragement out on me and others who have a drop of a good idea in an
ocean of tired clichés and flatulent bromides about this terrible kind of imprisoning
homosexual self-harmfulness, rather than, more appropriately and realistically, on her
parents, who most likely swam continuously with her in that kind of numbingly rotten
sea of suffocating cruelty.

Perhaps the more severely or crucially a particular gay person is psychically injured in
trying to grow up gay, therefore, the greater the resulting tendency shamefacedly to then
misbegottenly identify (consciously or otherwise) with one’s ubiquitous abusers of the
past and present, and so the greater proclivity to subsequently become in some distorted
but relieving manner like one’s heterosexist mom and dad, and finally to then
righteously, guilt-trippingly trash getting the gay-centered assistance one consequently
would need to develop more wholesomely as valuably homosexual.

This victimizational diversion away from appropriately attempting a fuller gay self-
realization toward persistently upholding the loyally-breeding parents
overestimationally instead, as sourced operatively in homophobically-inflicted
childhood pain and shame of a most cruel and absolute sort, I think is at the bitter heart
of the later bad hunger for a vitiating adult gay assimilationism—a conscious and/or
unconscious craving to more so be what mom and dad would have most fondly liked one
to be, without giving up gayness altogether, rather than to further grow actualizationally
into that queerly-singular uniqueness one actually feels his or her homosexual self to be
most interested in fully substantifyingly becoming deep down inside—as it is at the
poisoned heart of Karen’s nasty diatribe against me, as I will soon attempt to more so
parse out.

The shame-based gay wish to self-compromisingly assimilate, then, like some kind of
malignant disease or addiction, arises destructively out of a living problematic situation,
here, that of the dialectical, psychological tug-of-war involved in the core subjective
struggle to be more or less wholesomely identified with one’s homosexual libidinal
drive. Because we same-sex-loving people have all been raised in societies profoundly
heterosexist, continually brainwashed from birth to utterly distrust our own gay essence,
our own natural tendency, the lastingly-foul result in us is to neurotically (if not
sociopathically) resist our own homosexuality in its more-considerable implications if
not altogether, to minimize, compartmentalize, and reduce same-sex love’s larger
shamanic call for each of us and indeed for all humanity: this is the morbid divisiveness
and self-consuming thwartfulness that gay assimilationism humiliationally amounts to.
The orienting desire for such thorough and therewith supposedly-humane integration
inspirationally arises from and in turn disproportionately seeks to reinforce a
psychologically-sourced alienation in feeling and thought from being harmonically and
advantageously more gay-centered. Such a self-betraying position unfairly and
perpetuatingly privileges those familial, religious, political and corporate systems that,
rancid from long-unchallenged excess, flagrantly continue to situationally control and
dominationally extend terrible unjust power up to the very moment.

In stark moral contrast to this latter state of affairs, a counter-sensibility that

alternatively seeks to legitimately honor gay-centeredness in feeling and thought
 
  36

 
thereby politically foregrounds metaphorical Uranian systems of autarchic self-
realization as well as a larger freedom from toxic homophobic shame and all the other
terrifyingly-imprisoning subjective features of lingering, severe childhood trauma
misbegottenly arising from a gay life inevitably raised in heterosexist, one-dimensional
tyranny and hatefulness. Of course, differing attitudes of gay-centeredness and gay
assimilationism can also overlap or exist simultaneously in a person. The question here
is about how conscious a homosexual individual can be about his or her approach to
being (or not being) gay. Is it a gay, a heterosexist or a mixed approach? Is it one aiming
to become more constructively, self-reflectively aware or not? Indeed, can one be
consciously attempting to be gay-centered or gay-affirmative, yet still be unconsciously
powerfully heterosexist?10

The Big Scream (as it were)

If we were to look at Karen’s blog statement in regard to that last question, it would
appear that the answer is indubitably yes.

Karen’s main attack on me in her commentary, which takes up its middle section,
concerns her big criticism as to how I handled, or mishandled, her following the
precious dying moments of Michael Callen, and how and why she has been holding a
resultant tremendous grudge about it for more than 15 years. I meanly screamed at her,
she says. She is quite upset about this awful utterance, being the good person that she is.
She writes, “I told him about what I thought had been a miraculous reconciliation before
Michael died,” and then, horror of horrors, “Doug suddenly started screaming at me.”
She quickly repeats the word “screaming” two more times for greater emphasis:
“Literally screaming,” and “He was screaming something.”

Karen says I was enraged or offended about how she “had violated Michael's very being”
because she had spontaneously decided, apparently as the only figure of such authority
present at that moment, to generously officiate over a momentous death-bed
conversation where an estranged Michael was redemptively invited to finally forgive his
family. “So when his family called,” Karen relates of this opportune incident during
Michael’s final moments in the hospital, she “told them Michael didn't have much time
and they should tell him they loved him and say goodbye,” and that Michael had then
been sufficiently coherent to speak with various family members, including his mother,
who was thereupon busy “promising to bury his ashes under his favorite apple tree in
their backyard,” which protestations then led the mother to say she loved her son, which
accordingly prompted Michael to say, “I love you too, mom.” Karen observes about this
exchange, “It was the last thing he said. He lapsed back into a coma—as if he'd been
holding out to say those goodbyes.”

She says I yelled at her because I outragedly held that she had selfishly betrayed
Michael’s last wishes, that “Michael didn't want to have anything to do with his family”
in any way at the end. For the fourth time she uses the “s” word, recounting that “then
Doug started screaming at me about how this was really all about me and my shadow—
by which he apparently meant my Jungian shadow. This was all about me wanting
healing with my family who had abandoned me—on and on and on,” which
characterization of the event suggests that I was badly berating her, that I was
 
  37

 
aggressively acting out a nasty hidden agenda, that I really didn’t care about her or even
Michael, and that I had indeed, to top it off, meanspiritedly “choose[n] this moment to
be so cruel” to her, as she then speculates about the event. She subsequently uses this
supposed vicious cruelty to justificationally go on to a following, even more total
character defamation of myself as well as of all my currently-closest colleagues, in
particular Chris Kilbourne, Wendell Jones and especially Mitch Walker.

My Shadow Descent

When I first heard from a colleague about Karen’s malign account of what she claimed
was my malicious, harmful screaming at her (as well as her other outrageous
falsifications), internal quandaries related to my own existential truth (or lack thereof)
exploded emotionally in my face, sending me on a rapid descent into my feeling
underworld to face a still traumatically disordered and childishly fragmented part of my
own interior object relations, and then I—you can guess!—screamed! This felt shakiness
around my own existential ontology, which I have been trying to better address
practically and comprehensionally over the last twenty years of conducting my own gay-
centered inner work, was thereby helpfully revealed to me, yet again, as sourced in a
yelling infant who had frustratedly never gotten empathically held, and for a while, at
that candidly self-revealing level of subjective attentiveness movingly opened up by my
initial affective reactions to Karen’s assaultive effort, I did feel suffocatingly trapped in
the complex world of this infant’s early pain and misery, consumed by depression, fear,
hurt and shame. Now I was well constricted emotionally into my own trained one-
dimensionality of mind in pertinent regard to then reasonably perceiving what was
happening in myself and in the outer world, due to highly charged, still-unresolved
subjective issues influentially operating in my own personal sense of self.

As friends then fortunately helped me to gradually tease apart my crushing affects of

terrible abjection due to bad child abuse as clarifyingly distinguished from
perception/assessment of the situation taking place objectively in public, and also to
better dialectically engage the “borderline” or more-insane aspects of my badly-
devastated self there so being once more painfully opened to my struggling attention, I
began to better appreciate that Karen’s provocative attack was not so much a thrust
primarily to be taken personally, even though directed at me in large part, as it entailed
something more encompassing and pertinent, that in fact, her perfidious assault was
initiating a needed airing out of that malignantly-entrenched subjective business which
had been cumulatively festering unaddressed for a terribly long time already, not merely
in myself and Karen, but in the gay community and all of society as well. The insight also
arose that what was morally required of me in the challenging situation presented by
Karen’s iniquitous blog statement, besides my continued inner work, was not to remain
publically silent in the threatening face of her hostile advances, was not to only be badly
frightened by my vigorously-triggered shame and indecision, but to do what I could
realistically to infuse the conversation with a much-needed and more progressive
dialectic. As my awareness of myself as an ethical being in the situation thuswise
became helpfully more clear, I could better empathically appreciate how Karen’s ample
psychological transference onto me was aggravating enough in its generous enactment
to make any sane person scream, which I then did again, but no longer at her, rather at
the terrible affective and cognitive forces in me that were supporting her nasty effort,
 
  38

 
treasonous motivations sourced in my own immature complexes and in the
corresponding temptation of one-dimensional thought that would soothingly like to
either mortally polarize with Karen or beat a cowardly retreat into personal fear and
isolation.

Helping and Setting Limits

“A good psychotherapist helps clients bear and direct the difficult feelings that may be at
the root of depression or anxiety,” he says (Dunlap, 2008, p. 23). “A good leader does
the same.”

Peter Dunlap (2008) is engaged, in his book on “psychological liberalism,” to find a

“new hybrid language,” a “new branch of psychology,” a “transformative political
psychology” aimed at creating a novel kind of leader, a “transformative political
psychologist” (p. 23) engaged in performing a fresh kind of healing, not just one-on-one,
but also in the world at large, thus so pioneering what he calls “political therapy” (p. 24).
What is at stake in this effort, he says, is that almost everybody is terribly frightened of
the future. They are fearful of it because it is “strange” and magical and therefore
disruptive. Speaking subjectively, then, people are afraid of the difficult emotions
triggered by anticipation of an uncertain future, so to defend against that they cling
more so to the status quo and its apathetic but safe ways—yet even to the point that it
kills them, or us?

Sometimes it is good to say to unruly children, to dysfunctional clients in

psychotherapy, as well as to psychologically irresponsible adults in general: enough is
enough!

My Michael

Getting back to Karen’s core complaint, she correctly points out that when “AIDS
activist, writer and singer Michael Callen started falling ill, Doug organized a team of
people to be his care providers.” She also accurately says that Michael, “along with
Richard Berkowitz and their doctor Joseph Sonnanband [sic], virtually invented the idea
of safe-sex and Michael also co-founded HIV/AIDS organizations that directly involved
PWAs. Michael was also the star singer of the Flirtations, the famous gay male acapela
group.” All else in relation to the Michael story, at least according to my perspective, she
badly distorts.

I grew close to Michael when he moved, as many of us New York City-expats did, to take
up a healthier and more gaily-spiritual life in Los Angeles, the birthplace of the
Mattachine Society and the Radical Faerie Movement, and, in Michael’s case, to flee
from some vicious shadow projections he was getting as a fey Cassandra who had been
warning the gay community even early on in the AIDS crisis that unsafe sex practices
were killing us. The fact that Gay Related Immune Disorder, which was what the disease
was called back then, was caused by something easily spread through sex, was not
information which many gay people, particularly men, wanted to hear circa 1983.
Rather than change their own risky behavior, some individuals persistently sought to

 
  39

 
destroy Michael, even though he offered a sex-positive intervention, namely the use of
condoms and the lessening of unsafe practices.

So Michael finally journeyed to California in Sept. 1990 to develop a new gay life, and he
did so without his longtime lover, all by himself, without much if any support at all. He
moved into a dilapidated HUD apartment in the run-down Hollywood of the time,
where he wrote dozens of letters a day, read countless books on anything gay he could
lay his hands on, and worked to figure out why he was suffering from so much endemic
psychological pain. He was exquisitely proud of himself that, after living in L.A. for more
than a year, he “finally,” as he put it, hauled his ass into treatment with Richard Levin, a
leading exponent of the then-emerging school of gay-affirmative psychotherapy, who
worked at APLA. Because I myself had entered gay-centered therapy three years before,
and because both of us were increasingly feeling deeply moved by the basic principles of
what we were learning therein, namely that a crushed gay child lay in tremulous hiding
among the foggy recesses of our uncharted unconscious psyches, a sweet fey youngling
badly bashed but not really destroyed by foul heterosexist parenting, Michael and I in
consequence formed a deep bond together after we first became reacquainted and then
more involved with each other in town (we had previously been casual acquaintances in
N.Y.C.), as I will detail more of below, a sincere, loving and growing communion based
on the mutual kinds of unprecedented insights we were each appreciatively gaining from
the therapy situation, particularly from a gay-affirming sort of psychotherapeutics,
which healing realizations both of us could then savor more so together as the finest
kind of valuable consequence to our deeply-involved participation in the gay liberation
movement we each had known to date.

At the time Michael moved to L.A., I myself was not so clear on how my own life was
going to proceed. Until I had hauled my ass into therapy at the age of 29, I had lived
mentally as it now seems to me most people do, in a kind of sickly existential cloud of
hazy obscurity as to who I really amounted to in an inner sense, so that I based all my
self-worth, such as it was, on externally oriented situations, like my already long-term
romantic partnership and my power position as the town’s then most-published gay
journalist. To this extent, I lived psychologically in a co-dependent merger with my
world at large, which meant in practice that I anxiously suffered neurotically to a
considerable extent and was pretty much confused, resentful, passive aggressive, and
badly stuck developmentally (all of which I covered up in various defensive ways,
though fat does not lie—and I am today indeed more trim).

Frank discussions and self-confessions about such intimate matters cemented my

growing bond with Michael Callen. Like the A-student he was, Michael was reading
everything on gay psychology he could to augment his own inner work and also to build
more of a connection with me. On top of this, he stepped up the convivial social wooing
of my partner, performance artist Tim Miller, and myself that he had begun in concert
with our growing friendship, using his Wildean wit combined with the androgynous
mystique of his strong Two Spirit nature, to say nothing of his Martha Stewart panache
at orchestrating elaborate, seven-course Marcella Hazan-informed “Italian Kitchen”
meals in his tiny Hollywood tenement to hungry and depleted gay activists in search of
warm maternal kindliness. He had no money but the finest virgin olive oil from
Sardinia, and he liked to, as he would say, “pamper my new favorite gay couple.” But the
 
  40

 
real affiliation between Michael and me took place via gay psychology, as I told him
about my dreams of Nazi concentration camps, with the head Kapo wearing the Medusa
faces of my mother and father, and he shared that he had similar fascistic dreams about
his own parents.

When Michael had asked Tim and me if we would legally assume his Power of Attorney,
around the end of 1991, and to basically take care of him as he moved volitionally more
so into his dying process, he said he was doing this because he could tell that he would
find in us as it went along a sense and sensibility which allowed a person such as himself
to, as he then frankly put it, die in the “most gay way possible.” My guess is that Michael
wanted and needed a depth-sort of psychological method as much as he needed
practical support in his bold aim to realistically attempt a better and, so to speak, more-
homosexual dying experience for himself. He was one of those liberal atheistic types
who no doubt considered ideas of Gay Spirit to be of some value and significance, but
allowed his skepticism of any higher power other than reason to back him down when
reason suggested that spirit was not a realistic hypothesis for himself personally (e.g., in
regard to his love for men and dick as a force greater than his conscious ego). So he
needed help to face his own resistance to what I would call the inherent intelligent will
of his homosexuality, which I was happy to offer him, and, although he never himself
attempted to cultivate a purposefully more-clearly-specific language about these
subjective gay themes, he was beginning to appreciate and share in my budding efforts
at the time to do so, which articulational attempts have continued to this day.

The arrangement made by Tim and me with Michael seemed by itself to set up a
situation that put me centrally at the front lines of caring for Michael both materially
and emotionally from then on, as it ensuingly turned out, for the following two years.
Tim would be pretty continuously going on performance tours to bring home much of
the bacon while I managed our domestic life as well as working on my journalism,
helping run Highways Performance Art Space as an important board member, and, now,
taking care of Michael as itself an increasingly full-time job. Michael, who had worked
for years as a corporate secretary, then taught me how to be well organized in this latter
venture as it quickly intensified with the growth of his needs, so as to minimize the
burden he would make on my life. When things had progressed more, he pushed us to
talk about the problem of psychological burdens also, even though he was just starting
to get a sense as to how to better do that by the time of his death.

We touched on the dilemma of how two well-crushed gay men could get emotionally and
physically close to each other and not feel overly burdened by the resulting
intimidational proximity; how to deal with each of our mother complexes (e.g.,
Michael’s conflictual terror of and desire for dependency; my primitive wish to handle
my own hurt-rage by becoming co-dependent with others and then resenting the
consequent feeling of suffocation) and father complexes (e.g., for me as shown by how I
could be aggressively bullying to Michael about his excesses, such as his perpetual
mismanagement of funds, and his almost-obsessive need to make elaborate meals for
everybody, even though eventually he could barely stomach a spoonful without vomiting
and I was angry about all the weight I was gaining). The extent to which we addressed
these painfully-intimate issues grew in fits and starts over time, a limitation hardly
adequately resolved at his death, but our trying to better approach such previously-
 
  41

 
taboo areas was aided by the fact that both of us became increasingly committed to
bringing the work of therapy to our political lives and to our personal relationship.

We were assuredly scared of dealing more directly with our emotional and historical
shit, but we also did understand that the question of how to best handle the dying
experience pulled out from the midst of our cowardice what Michael called “gay ethics,”
or viable guidelines that could practically inform us in a good homosexual fashion as to
how best to proceed more constructively. He would often tell me his dreams. I
remember the one in which Michael fell into a pool and it was my mother who dove in to
rescue him, and that he almost preferred to die than be helped by her. At first, he
laughed at the absurdity of dreams, but when I pointed out what the dream might be
saying, which is in part that something in his psyche represented by my mother’s desire
to “help” (my mother did really epitomize that quality) might actually be trying to kill
him, he looked at me with frightened worry. He never did come around to altogether
accepting the notion that there was a godlike intelligence behind our dreams, but he did
become increasingly more psychologically minded. Michael would be the one to ask,
“what is up with us, you seem distant Doug-a-las?” or “When you tell me that I have to
stop cooking, I get the feeling that you are my father, even though I know you are not,”
or “When you are late to see me, I get angry and upset, but then I realize that you are as
fucked up as I am, and thus you resent me in ways, and then I forgive you.”

There was also the issue of Homosexual Eros, which, I am embarrassed to say, I feel was
not in some ways adequately enough handled by me or Michael, although, to be fair to
both of us, I think we did the best that the blind-leading-the-blind could possibly bring
about realistically. By the point that Michael had one year of life left to him, his lower
body, from his groin down, had become covered in leathery purple KS lesions, especially
his legs, where hardly an ounce of untainted skin remained. No one would touch him
erotically any longer, even though he still sought out sex and love, and Michael, like all
the rest of us, was to begin with touch-starved and acutely lonely. On top of that
confounding deficit, he needed to be physically massaged because his ill and medicated
body was quite stiff and often ached, even though he would never have dared to ask. He
would return home to his Hollywood dump following chemotherapy treatment, where
the mattress lay on the floor, feeling sick as a dog, and as rigid as a board. I would stop
by, appalled to see the Diva of the acapela gay male singing world lying in the mortal
dust of unjust homosexual suffering. At first, I was frightened and even disgusted to lay
my own hands on the leathery skin. But the process of gay-centering inner work greatly
helped me to see that what I was frightened of in actuality was “touching the skin” of my
own inner felt monstrosity from having been repressively raised in the badly shaming
way I was. I began to share these insights with Michael as I worked on his body, which
he found fascinating and profoundly moving. With the help of Homo-eros, the defenses
and hyper-rationalism Michael had inherited from his homophobic parents and a
lifetime of living in N.Y.C., as well as my own parallel rigid disembodiment, began to
erode between us.

With these so to speak hands-on conversations, Michael began to project highly-charged

erotic feelings onto me of a profoundly numinous nature. I was of the same Jewish DNA
as his former lover. Feverish, Michael would call out to me: “Richard, please, please,
please hold me.” At such needful times, I would embrace him, but I am not sure if my
 
  42

 
horror and other reactivity about what was happening to him may have impeded
Michael from reaching out further to me, again, a supposed failure on my part still
humiliatingly plaguing my memories of those days. I struggled at the time with many
challenging moments, where I would feel completely overworked, over-burdened,
frightened, lonely, yet then again, I would also experience delightful confirmatory
feelings of warmth, affection and inspiration in the way the whole situation was trying to
open the door for me and Michael into some ultimately-wonderful shamanic hero’s
descent, which for him, despite his avowed atheism, seemed to be happening quite
involvingly. Had I known what I do now, I would have better directly invited him to see
his romantic feelings for me as a projection of the archetypal double, that is, the same-
sex “soul figure” in Jungian terms, and encouraged him to strive for a more conscious
relationship to this supremely romantic “twin” inside (a homosexually-interiorizing
tactic often discussed by Mitch Walker [e.g. in Walker, 2009], who points out its
millennial heritage such as, for example, in regard to the Ka of the ancient Egyptians,
the daemon of Platonic teachers, the Angel of the Sufis). As it was, I did my best to
encourage Michael to seek enhancedly aware connection with his own gay soul as he
moved inexorably towards his mortal end, but this effort was unfortunately
compromised by my own lack of knowledge and by my intimidating terror of the
intimacy involved.

The further Michael descended into a more depthful alchemical self-transformation, the
more outlandish he became with both his body (he seemed by now to lack all shame
about it), his expressions of erotic yearning (mostly for me, but also for a handsome
intern or two), and then his irrepressible love of being gay, which he celebrated most
involvingly through working to shape his musical legacy, through constant affirmative
psychological vigilance of his crankiness and depression, with which he hardly ever
burdened me, and through a desire to be around “gay people, hot alive, sexy gay men, at
the last moments of my life.” One day he looked at me forlornly, maybe it was in the
later summertime of 1993, and asked me plaintively to help his “dying bag of bones”
relocate to the “Gay Ghetto of West Hollywood.” And because he knew that I could raise
my voice, he put his hands to his ears and shook his head, proclaiming that the “Diva
has spoken,” then mocking my protestations, imploring that we could raise the money
for his move from his wealthy financiers (whose fat wallets, by the way, dried up the
more he needed such people and the less he could entertain them).

It was during this subsequent Herculean move to West Hollywood, which occurred
about three months before Michael died, that I recall consolidating the care group I had
already been developing for some time, and which then involved Karen Ocamb.

It seems to me that I was experiencing difficulties in regard to Karen from the beginning
of her involvement that I am sure I did not address well enough. At this point in time,
she was not the big-name journalist she likes to think she is now. Depressed, sad and
needy, she seemed to have no life of her own. It concerned me that she could
compensatorily latch onto the situation with Michael. At times, I could not get rid of her,
such as when Michael and I needed to talk privately. I didn’t want to fall into the trap of
using her apparent neediness as an easy way to put her more so to work to then lighten
my own load, but I did not have the kind of emotional and reflective support I now have
to have worried that issue through sufficiently, I think, such that I am sure I probably
 
  43

 
exploited her seeming inner girl’s desperate need to belong, at least to some objectifying
extent. In addition to the above concerns, I was skeptical of Karen’s general tonal
attitude in regard to Michael’s parents, in that when she shared about the matter, she
consistently favored the general importance of the family over that of a more gay-
oriented position, a bias reflected in her seeming lack of awareness about a pact Michael
had made with me about limiting his homophobic family’s involvement, which I will
detail shortly. On top of these problems, Karen also showed tendencies during her
participation towards being possessive of Michael, controlling of his care, even
territorial, in addition to her quite-evident inclination to becoming overly involved.

But I believe I for the most part just looked the other way about all this, as long as
Karen’s provocative features did not become too intrusive while Michael and I retained
the main alliance and the main understanding of what was going on, which managerial
arrangement, unfortunately, eventually broke down at the end.

By now in his own inner growth, Michael was actively engaged in seeking out the key
ways whereby his endemic psychological pain was the bad result, in large part, of toxic
heterosexist parenting. He was fit-to-be-tied about how his literal mother and father
continued to uphold their supposedly-principled homophobic positions, this despite the
glaring facts that he was dying from AIDS and had become one of the nation’s most
renowned PWA (People with AIDS) spokespersons–and also one of the gay community’s
most beloved singers. Michael had already developed through his probing self-
considerations a gay-affirmative psychotherapeutic analysis of his mortal disease: part
of the reason for his suffering both in getting infected/sick and often feeling so
emotionally miserable about it, was foundationally due to the crushing assault on his
basic humanity tormentingly suffered by him as a gay child—and this from a man who
had never blamed anyone personally for anything if he could find any reason to take
responsibility instead! He was, therefore, very clear with me about how he wanted to
die—“as gay as possible! sans the parents!” He did not want his dysfunctional family
invading when he was most sick, and especially not when he was at death’s door. He
suspected that their guilt over their incessant homophobia would make them, still as
selfish as ever, want to manipulatively and even coercively overcompensate at his
deathbed, when he would have virtually no strength to fight off any smarmy, last-
minute, parental reunional maneuvers. This gay-affirmative family systems strategy was
then efficiently applied by a true and long-experienced queen of stage-management to
subsequently arrange a carefully-orchestrated visit in which they would all say their
goodbyes when Michael was still relatively strong. Michael asked that I stay involved the
entire time and be in the room when his parents came on the appointed day,
Thanksgiving 1993, so as to help him “hold my own” and “have a witness.”

His mom and dad were Midwest folk, the likes of which I previously had had little
interaction with in my coastal big-city life, so they were pretty much cultural strangers
to me. Indeed, they did appear oddly out of place ambling about in the gay wing of the
hospital in their properly reserved clothes (with Michael’s brother, who also came but
did not stay in Michael’s room during the big meeting), what with Michael as
irrepressibly fey as ever. Although superficially solicitous, his parents were true and
correct Christian conservatives who did not understand where Michael was coming from
in the slightest. I could see that both held strongly heterosexist views about the moral
 
  44

 
inferiority of homosexuality, much less about that of being a homosexual person, even
as they were discrete and polite, although it seemed to me his mother was more willing
to bend; perhaps she had a maternal instinct that emerged despite her engrained biases,
such that in the course of the meeting she did become more warm, present and humane
with Michael, for example touching him and growing better attentively regardful, in
contrast to the father, who remained physically cold, aloof and downcast. Michael’s
father no doubt was in terrible pain to watch his son die, but he tried to hide it. He could
not open up enough to accept Michael being a decent human being as a gay man even
while he was with his ill son, even a little. He just would not give in on that level of
compassion, through word or deed, although I think this supposedly-Christian, rejecting
refusal grieved him much more than it did Michael, by the emotively-tense look on his
face, as it appeared like he was fighting back tears a lot. Michael, I should mention,
during the horrible course of his illness never lost either his outrageous humor or his
human dignity. The weaker he got physically, the stronger he grew as a proud gay man,
and that day with his folks, he was indeed in very fine form throughout!

As Michael and I had previously planned out, he was going to put “the question” to them
once and fairly. When we were all together that day in his room, he proceeded to ask if
they could love him unconditionally for being gay. His mother said yes, but his father
could not answer. He could only put his head on Michael’s sunken-in chest and silently
cry. Michael spent some time rubbing his own father’s head in a soothing fashion, as if
to say, “I understand your limitations.” That was about it. When they soon after left,
Michael announced to me with great gusto, “Doug-a-las, I have done my duty here and I
am done, ‘D,’ ‘O,’ ‘N,’ ‘E’ - DONE!” He quite firmly indicated that he did not want to deal
with them anymore, lugubrious as they were at best, that he instead wanted to move on,
“and see where death will lead us now, darling!” To say the least more about how it was,
we did then also have a good cry. And we spent a fair amount of time in the following
days talking about how destructive heterosexist families can be to a homosexual
person’s good connection to Gay Spirit. We were vexed yet curious about the most
appropriate way to deal with them, inevitable yet toxic as they were. Neither cutting
them off nor embracing them seemed like reasonable alternatives in satisfactory answer
to this sticky problem. I seem to recall Michael telling me a bit later that he had reported
his steps in dealing with the family situation to his therapist, who was staying in touch
with him and who gave him much affirmation for his courageous Thanksgiving act of
relative closure.

After the big hospital scene, I took his parents and brother out for dinner. Trained to be
the “good Jewish boy,” I was charming and sweet. I also had no problem explaining to
them, in a way they might understand better, where Michael was coming from.
Michael’s father seemed more human and less rigid without his son present, a little
more able to relate to me as a person who happened to be gay, in contrast to his
handling of his fey progeny. I should also mention that, while I felt equitable enough
relating to Michael’s family, I was at a period in my individuation where I was very
angry at my own parents for a parallel stubborn refusal in them to also really accept me
as gay. While I do not believe I acted any of this deeper anger out with Michael’s folks, I
am sure that my later reaction to Karen’s telling me about what she did with Michael at
the end was likely informed not just by my irritation with Michael’s domestic conditions
and history, but undoubtedly also by my own then-unresolved family issues.
 
  45

I should also mention here that Karen’s account in her blog statement of the
Thanksgiving family meeting is radically different from my own, in that she claims to
have been “the liaison” between Michael and his parents during the visit when in
actuality I served in that role and she only had a minor supporting part (I have various
care-group memos and correspondence with the family clearly indicating my central
position in managing the event and the parents’ and brother’s later warm appreciation
towards me for my generous help at that time), as she simultaneously paints me as
disengaged and merely critical of the Thanksgiving visit and her supposed efforts as an
otherwise much-thanked “buffer and go-between” even then on behalf of a better
familial reconciliation with Michael, all of which is an outrageously self-serving
distortion that significantly mars the actual history involved, although it is possible I
was somewhat critical at this point with her due to those irritating qualities of hers
which I outlined before being well-activated around her own very-modest involvement
in the big Thanksgiving event.

Returning to Michael’s story, my memory is that his very slow physical decline began to
speed up around this point, and things became more taxing. During what turned out to
be the last weeks of his life, the repeated misery of being in the hospital, then being
released, only to be returned again the next day (due to spiking fevers and nausea, for
example) was scary and extra draining for him and me. At this time, Michael’s old
partner, Richard Dworkin, was in town to see Michael and work on his final Legacy
album, which Richard was producing, and they experienced something of a
reconciliation. By now Michael’s support group, with Richard and Karen actively
involved in this final period, seemed to be operating very well. After almost two years of
giving Michael pretty much my full-time attention, and after assessing that I had
developed enough of a viable network for him and that so far he seemed to be hanging in
there persistently and adequately, I decided that I just had to take a temporary relative
break from the constant 24/7 vigilance I had been attentively holding for some time
now, in order to salvage my own quite-stressed-out mental and physical health! This is
not to say that I in any way abandoned Michael, and in fact I am sure I saw him or
talked to him at least once a day. Yet had I known how comparatively soon Michael was
going to die, particularly considering his final wishes, I would not of course have
relinquished so much of my direct involvement in his situation at that point.

My not being present as I had been before unfortunately created a comparative vacuum
of leadership “on the ground,” so to speak, which I believe Karen wasted no time in
trying to exploit within a matter of days by way of the pushy sorts of questionable
actions and agendas I detailed earlier.

Back to Karen’s Distortions

Karen writes that when she told me she had single-handedly facilitated a deathbed
conversation between Michael and his family, I had screamed at her—and I had done
this just after Michael had, in a sudden downward turn, unexpectedly expired with
neither Karen nor I present on Dec. 27, 1993. Unfortunately, I do not now precisely
recall that final hospital engagement with Karen. I am sure it is quite possible I might
have therein expressed some intensely-fiery emotion, especially given the already-
 
  46

 
charged context for me, such as my own grief and loss, my exhaustion, and perhaps even
abandonment guilt over not having attended more closely to Michael’s final moments
considering what then did happen and in light of my prior good cause to be irritably
suspicious of Karen’s cloying manipulativeness. Still, I am sure I would have been less
emotionally-susceptible about all this today, and less retaliatorily-inclined, knowing
how complex family relations really are, and having worked on my own violence and
emotional reactivity quite a bit since then. At the same time, it is also comparatively
interesting to relevantly note here that when I recently spoke about the whole Karen
blog attack to a well-known gay scholar who is interested in the history of Michael
Callen, he responded by saying “so what” that I might have screamed at her, given both
the stress of the dying process and the conflictual tension about what Michael really
needed.

From Karen’s blog statement, it would seem that she was the unvarnished heroine in
this story of our relations and Michael’s death, while I was an apparently-caring gay
activist now more honestly revealed as a wrathful demon. It seems that everything she
says about this matter in some way is meant as a slam against me, including the
implication that Richard Dworkin, Michael’s ex, had flown in and “basically taken over,”
because of what had become a badly neglectful situation. What her story reveals,
however, despite her attempts to advantageously shape it, is her ultimate alliance with
the assimiliationist component in the assimilationist/gay-centric dialectic:

I was with Michael the day he died. It was a Sunday and Michael's ex-lover
Richard Dworkin (who produced Michael's Legacy album), who had flown in
from NYC and basically taken over, was taking a several hour break. Michael was
in a coma but we believed he could still hear.

So when his family called, I told them Michael didn't have much time and they
should tell him they loved him and say goodbye. I told Michael they were on the
phone and then held the phone to his ear. First his brother, then his father told
him they loved him and were proud of him. "I love you, son," his father said.

And then it was his mother's turn. She talked to him awhile—promising to bury
his ashes under his favorite apple tree in their backyard. And then she said, "I
love you, Michael. I will always love you."

A tear rolled down Michael's cheek. "I love you, too, mom." It was the last thing
he said. He lapsed back into a coma—as if he'd been holding out to say those
goodbyes. I talked to the family a bit and then hung up. Richard came back
shortly thereafter. I told Michael I'd see him later and I left.

Two hours later, they called to tell me Michael had died. I rushed back to
Midway. There seemed to be a lot of commotion. Doug and Richard were acting
like rivals and Sandra Golvin was in the room howling in what was apparently
some ritual. Richard told Doug in no uncertain terms to get her out of there. I
waited a bit and then went in to say my goodbyes.

 
  47

 
I do not remember this final situation at the hospital as Karen describes it, nor do I
recall at any time being Richard’s rival. I remember he and I working only lovingly
together, and we still have a warm rapport and eros to this day. To share another
comment about what Karen is saying, as I read her assimilationist trashing of Michael’s
gay-centering effort to live and die more gay, an assertive effort he was already explicitly
naming in regard to his Power of Attorney arrangement with me and Tim nearly two
years previously, I feel disgusted with how she self-servingly suggests that Michael had
been “holding out” to say these last-minute familial farewells. While it is true that
neither Michael nor I ever to my recollection explicitly carefully made clear to all the
caregivers and/or Karen specifically what Michael’s last gay-centering wishes were, thus
allowing Karen some “wiggle room” to justify her unilateral deathbed maneuver, it
seems to me that her egotistical account of the matter erases what the whole goodbye
scenario Michael and I had orchestrated the prior month when he was more conscious
had been intending and, indeed, eliminates Michael’s entire philosophy of gay meaning
that I am sure was common knowledge among all our group caregivers due to Michael’s
continuous expression to everyone of what was going on for him and what was
important in these terms, and becoming more gay-centered to him was growing ever
more significant all the time as he moved closer to his finale!

The Tibetans have an idea that as a person dies, she or he enters into a variety of bardo
states that bear on her or his further self-realization. I still find it offensively outrageous
that Michael might have had his homosexual bardo experience meanly contaminated by
what seems to me Karen’s last-minute assimiliationist-oriented violence. I also don’t
like how Karen mocks Sandra Golvin’s lesbian-centered shamanistic presence at the
deathbed. Even though Sandra did get very intense and needed to be calmed down,
Michael had in life very much adored her fiery lesbian spirit and appreciated learning
“the secrets of the tribe” from her. Sandra, who founded the pioneering Center for
Sapphic Psychoanalytic Studies in Los Angeles in 2005, herself died in an untimely
manner from ocular melanoma three years ago, a fact that Karen knows because she
exchanged emails with me about publishing Sandra’s obituary (which appeared in IN
Los Angeles Magazine in August 2006) but about which she mentions nothing when
referencing her in the blog statement, suggesting that, to Karen, Sandra dead or alive is
all the same. How anti-lesbian is that! Given our own homophobically-influenced
limitations as caregivers and as persons, most of us around Michael still tried to help
create a sacred, homosexually-oriented caregiving milieu. Karen malevolently elides this
cooperative, gay-centric appreciation about and historically-pioneering approach to the
matter of Michael’s death to this day in her seemingly still-compulsive need to
backstabbingly advocate on behalf of her heterosexist parental complexes’ endlessly
poisonous demands.

In retrospect, it now makes even more sense that I could have first handled hearing the
big surprise from Karen about her nasty betrayal of Michael by spontaneously
screaming at her. While I do not remember “the scream” itself as Karen recounts it, and
certainly not with Michael’s body present or nearby, I am sure that I was capable of such
an intensely-expressive oral action. What I do recall is a stern conversation with her in
the hospital lounge, but I do not trust my memory completely. Here is how she puts this
climactic exchange between us:

 
  48

 
I wasn't alone with Michael for long when Doug came in. I told him about what I
thought had been a miraculous reconciliation before Michael died—and Doug
suddenly started screaming at me. Literally screaming. Just steps away from
Michael. He was screaming something about how I had violated Michael's very
being—because Michael didn't want to have anything to do with his family.

I said that's not true. And then Doug started screaming at me about how this was
really all about me and my shadow—by which he apparently meant my Jungian
shadow. This was all about me wanting healing with my family who had
abandoned me—on and on and on.

He was so intense and persistent, I wondered if he might not be right. Sitting on a

bench outside Michael's hospital room, I stopped and mentally went over
everything. I checked my heart. I'm in a 12 Step program that requires rigorous
honesty if I'm to stay clean and sober—and I went to that place and asked the
question: did I facilitate the reconciliation between Michael and his family
because of my own family issues?

The answer was no. Michael was my friend and this was always about him. I
looked at Doug and wondered why he would choose this moment to be so cruel—
in the name of being helpful.

A Considered Analysis

My and Michael’s gay-centering perspective on the salient importance to him of his

deepening relationship to the symbolic death-and-rebirth cycle of the homosexual
individuation process is, as I have pointed out, never even mentioned by Karen in any of
her blog explications. In consequence there is the low implication that I possessed little
besides my own selfish narcissistic agenda regarding Michael’s death, which ugly
perspective I would suggest actually more likely reflects her own internal condition in
the situation. She has rhetorically contrasted, in regard to our climactic confrontation,
what she casts as my more-misguided motives with her own more-altruistic ones, which
concern a kindhearted attempt to innocently aid a more-healing reconciliation at the
end between Michael and his parents. I maintain that she is severely slanting the truth
of the matter in this regard, that she is positioning herself thuswise not because she
really cares about Michael or his family per se, her stated concern thereby amounting to
a manipulative and exploitational performance, but rather because a larger hidden
agenda subjectively lurks behind the issue intimidationally for her, one centered on the
deadly fear of a possibly earth-shaking, gay-centered experience that she consciously or
unconsciously feels she could not possibly bear because of the threat that would pose to
her own addictive alliance with a heterosexual false-self system. If she can in responsive
defense so-to-speak murder my side of a dialectic that really wants to play out more
procreatively within her, a gay-focusing position which for me requires my persistently-
dedicated attempts (sometimes quite lame!) at rigorous confrontation of my own hidden
violence, and after that vengeful erasure if she can then functionally replace a real
dialectic one-dimensionally with just her own consciously and defensively-held position
against the evil enemy, then she has paradoxically “won” in subterfugingly doing the
dirty work of the one-dimensional society towards herself and others. Her position looks
 
  49

 
gay-positive, as do those of Don and Mark. But, in actuality, all their pertinent views, I
believe, hide a resolutely-heterosexist rotten core. If Karen allies with the other two, she
does so, at the subjective motivational level I am here suggestedly considering,
apparently in order mainly to thereby help her neatly continue avoiding having to
personally entertain the dialectical problematic of abiding Gay Spirit and its
antagonistic complement, gay shadow, troublesomely resident in her own felt
experience of valuably and meaningfully being a homosexually-identified person.

The issue at hand cannot be reduced to whether or not one version of the story of what
“actually” happened in our relationship or with Michael is merely true or false, although
I am tempted to say that I am right and Karen is wrong! On the negative side, did I yell
at her for selfish motives, and did she demonize me in her blog merely to attempt to
destroy me and the gay-centering truths for which I try to stand? Or, on the positive
side, did I yell at her to provoke better into historical time a very importantly-needed
conversation, and did she officiate over a death-bed talk because that is actually what
was more salutary for Michael, who had perhaps been pressured into denying an
additional familial reconciliatory possibility by his and my own thoughtless one-
dimensionality?

What if all of this is all partly true? My issue with Karen is not just about the fact that
she says whatever it is that she is saying, although, to be sure, her one-dimensional
accusations are painful and defamatory, and must be confronted. Rather, what seems
most egregious is that she takes about one millisecond in her blog response to entertain
the possibility that my big confrontation with her might have had any constructive
merit, and, in turn, what that breezy tone then suggests about her own degree of
accurate self-responsibility as a supposedly ethical person. In this evaluative light,
notice how she characterizes our hot encounter and her own considerations about it in
the blog section I just quoted above.

The lack of logically-reasoned, intelligent discourse in Karen’s thoughts and in our

movement generally, the kind of more-sound consideration that would fairly allow for a
multi-dimensional perspective on feeling life beyond the slightest nod to the opposite
side in a heated debate, is the sorry fault of a collective repressive consciousness that
still badly dominates us all, which of course is not just Karen’s responsibility, as it
requires everyone to face, dare I say, the hypocritically-meanspirited Karen within.

The “false consciousness” which Herbert Marcuse talks about, that would permit any
gay person to buy Karen’s well-cooked version of the truth, that confuses an agreeable
appearance with true substance, that accepts emotional slavery described as objective
freedom, is a long-term politico-psychological problem each of us must face sooner or
later on the liberatory road, internally sourced so foundationally as that difficulty is for
us homosexual folk, in my opinion, in having been contextually forced to “love” our
closest homophobic oppressors, namely our parents, starting from birth, as we
aboriginally attempted a gay maturational process in life. The basic confusion wrought
by the above paradox as to what is “real” versus what is “promoted as real” on such a
primal level of budding selfhood, usually assures gay people’s continued assimilationist
loyalty to the heterosexist collective to some important extent, while it simultaneously
keeps them effectively alienated from better attaining the greater inner reaches and
 
  50

 
procreative transpersonal treasures of the estimable gay psyche not only well beyond
childhood but indeed usually throughout adulthood as well, such that the ongoing
disorganizational effect of great social bigotry misfortunately amounts to a rolling
dehumanizational quagmire in the subjective homosexual realm which in the end will
objectively stymie our emancipatory movement in its very “success” as one sincerely
dedicated to the most authentic and fullest gay liberation, not to mention what this
toxically-pernicious kind of thwartful shadow psychology more generally could
ominously mean for our entire species, if not more prudently forcefully dealt with
overall.

The one-dimensional speed with which Karen makes her unilateral decision to grasp at
a last-minute family reunion for practically-comatose Michael, can be interpreted in
psychoanalytic parlance as suggestively due to a subliminal, yet overbearing, anxious
need in that decisive moment to swiftly take up the powerful early defense called
“splitting,” or self-protective dissociation from strongly-conflictual affective material, on
account of a lack of tolerance for the larger pain involved in any deeper exploration of
inner sticky feelings about a traumatic early childhood then being dangerously
intimated in the intensity of unexpectedly receiving what was possibly some sort of
manipulative family phone call just while Michael was in his last moments and just as he
had feared. She does report undertaking a brief and superficial rumination about the
matter in light of my subsequent challenge, only to quickly return to her self-righteous
original position, “Michael was my friend and this was always about him.” She then does
what anyone who refuses to responsibly face her shadow does under otherwise badly
self-incriminating conditions, she demonizes the person raising the issue: “I looked at
Doug and wondered why he would choose this moment to be so cruel—in the name of
being helpful,” when I had confronted her at the hospital.

As I mentioned in my statement earlier on about “the question of validity,” I would

suggest that Karen is here demonstrating a severe lack of any interest in authentic
truthfulness through her supposed argument by her evident refusal to do more than
entertain for a split second the possible value of my position about confronting her when
it turned out that so much was at stake, that the “cruelty” she was feeling then and since
was much more about herself than me (although not exclusively). In the hope for a
greaterly-useful dialectic, it is wise to appreciate that the other side’s position should at
least be sensibly analyzed for possible confirmation, but this would mean that the
painful feelings provoked by the issues seemingly most at stake in the argument, would
have to be tolerated more inside. Neither in referencing her original assessment nor in
commenting on it now does Karen even note the possibility that any of her big feelings
either recounted or implied could itself be an issue or a symptom, perhaps most
markedly in that she never once considers how her capacity for accurate self-reflection
about her part in the “scream” incident, not to mention that part itself, might have been
seriously contaminated by her own, admitted, pending “emotional breakdown from all
the unprocessed grief” which consequentially soon followed upon Michael’s death.

Political psychologist Dunlap (2008) says that one of the main issues any new politics
must be concerned with is “emotional impulsivity,” which he says is the opposite of the
ability to tolerate “healthy shame” (p. 45). When a person only defensively reacts to the
spontaneous provocation of badly distorted, toxic shame, access to the valuable
 
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experience of what could be considered integrally-appropriate, healthy shame is
blocked. But, when one engages in the effort of purposefully “Attending to this [healthy]
shame,” Dunlap says, rather than merely reacting automatically to feeling bad emotions,
it “is likely to intensify the experience of the future” quite auspiciously in contrast to
being endlessly mired in internally toxic moods, such that there will be a marvelously
empowering, “transforming effect” on one’s “political identity” (p. 45) in auspicious
consequential result.

Karen’s apparent lack of interest in looking for her own healthy shame in the face of
dealing with herself and others around big toxic feelings, as also her not recognizing any
theoretical need to fully face the shadow for herself and generally, indicate that she has
not given the interpretation I was advancing 15 years ago or today, about the ubiquitous
need for gay-centered inner work, any meaningful weight. But I do her no doubt a
disservice if I take her impulsivity too one-sidedly myself. Another way to look at the
situation is that she is actually VERY INTERESTED in the other side to her position!
Perhaps, in truth, she has become so involved in this contentious matter because of
highly mixed motives; in that sense, maybe she has just missed having good enough
therapy to help do more than collude with her own ill-intentioned defenses in that
involvement. Her extended brooding over the unresolved encounter with me suggests
that never has anyone helped her work through her own thereso-vigorously-provoked,
Nietzschean-type ressentiment of that enchaining effect which I bet is so common to the
tamed billions today. She simply got unfairly yelled at, that’s all there is to it, and she’s
still righteously mad about it. Such a self-centered and heretofore secretive attitude
suggestively indicates to me that she is lustily and shamedly projecting onto me a very
big negative transference, that is, a powerful and conflicted emotional meaningfulness
associated with a key figure of the developmental past, usually a parent or the childhood
shadow-self. And just as a client would in fair justice expect a competent therapist to
appreciate and work with such a transferential projection as the relief-seeking impulse
of someone who had been very badly traumatized, no doubt as a community we need
courageous folks to be able to constructively recognize and carefully manage such
powerful projective transferences that may be relevantly going on in public as a very
influential way to model moving through some really awful pain badly ensconced
homophobically in all of us. And just as a good therapist would eventually confront the
transference and insist at some point that the need for angry attacks is sourced in
unresolved childhood hurt, pain and shame, and must no longer be misused to destroy
gay love, so too effectively-psychological gay community activists must stand up to
interpersonal community demonizing irresponsibly unleashed due to some homosexual
people’s fierce unconscious defenses and most problematic feelings, and suggest that,
for example in Karen’s case, it is time morally and historically that she grow up
emotionally a little more to not only cease and desist from nastily spoiling Michael’s
memory and his lustful yearning for a more gay-centered life and death any further, but
that, as a supposed community leader of some sort, she attemptedly model realistic
forms of better managing her own primal hurt, toxic shame and infantile aggression
than the lamentable job she has been doing so far, not just in order to stop viciously
projecting her exploitative shadow business reactionarily, but mostly so that she can
thereby hopefully find a better hint of truer lesbian love in her own satisfactional life,
such that the deeply enlightening and reformational consequences sure to valuably
result can then more equitably inform her subsequent writing and public speaking,
 
  52

 
rather than some awful deficit in regard to the intimate subjective matters I am here
touching upon, it seems to me, continuing to abandon her to the badly-compromised
moral situation she has malodorously descended into currently, which I believe is one of
crude hypocrisy and bad-faith self-righteousness internally rooted psychologically in an
unexamined affiliation with her own heterosexist parental complexes.

Karen as the Front for A One-Dimensional Society

We gay-centered psychological activists of the necessary future—which is how I describe

those of us trying to promote the kind of awareness and organizing I’m talking about in
this blog statement—are poised to more accurately challenge the gay-stunting varieties
of what Herbert Marcuse characterizes as the modern mind-prison of thoughtless one-
dimensionality nowadays being displayed outrageously by Karen, Don and Mark, as well
as this monstrous mechanism of subjective enslavement overall, through vigorously
fighting it first-and-foremost where it resides most intractably, in our individual psyches
themselves, undertaken by bravely entering into the inner world and persistently
encountering there the frozen pain, hurt rage and toxic shame of a smashed gay baby
self, whose traumatic horror can then be better feelingly partnered and alchemically
transformed embodimentally instead of only defeatedly stagnantly submitted to
deadenedly. And then, once we begin gaining such a better-felt grounding in our own
internal motivational issues as meaningful same-sex-loving persons, we can realistically
start to extend that good individuational work to others and to situations beyond self-
reparational therapy, into bigger matters concerning further homosexual realization
overall, where fresh gay efforts to publically call “foul” to outrageous and insidious one-
dimensionality duplicitously enacted under the guise of gay liberation, will again be met
with scapegoating projections ruthlessly aimed at nothing less than total annihilation.

We can try to helpfully view the feared anticipatory prospect of painfully undergoing
such victimizational decease, as well as the mean-hearted attempt at inflicting it,
symbolically. Karen cannot really destroy me; rather, I am likely feeling or re-
anticipating the murderous symbolic assault on my subjective self that gruesomely did
take place in my own infancy. Similarly, Karen’s obliterational resentment at me for
having hotly confronted her is perhaps about getting revenge for the childhood
liquidation of good connection to her own lesbian spirit that she still holds a lot of pain,
shame and rage about, and she feels safe enough or hateful enough (or both) about it
with me to confusedly rail on as if she were in a bad dream where we are both trying but
failing to emancipatorily wake each other up from the agonizing invalidational context
of that dominating heterosexist brainwashing she otherwise feels smotheringly trapped
compulsively into unceasingly upholding covertly when not more openly.

Understanding that we gay activists are now motivatingly obligated by an historically-

rising call to become psychological freedom fighters against gay “fear of the future,”
against the repressively homophobic “old ethic,” that destructive “one-dimensionality”
of mind and being with its assimilating unconscious heterosexism inside our same-sex-
loving selves and in today’s societies, a collective terribleness and primitiveness which
must be responsibly better addressed if ultimately everybody and even our planet are to
survive—such progressive understanding more knowingly endows our valid gay being
and enhanced psychological becoming with a tangibly thrilling meaning and overtly-
 
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framed initiatory purpose homosexually, in the intimating face of which it becomes
increasingly more difficult to merely defensively run and camouflagingly hide as Karen,
Mark and Don have regressively specialized in dishonorably doing.

The so-called “scream,” then, possibly amounts to more than just an incident of personal
acting out or working through of terrible old trauma, but may include as well the modicum
of a transcendent factor involving the possible gay future, as further suggested by the huge
symbolic weight Karen has invested it with, a timely qualitative significance in its own
expressive right that I would suggest is, if it is actually present, of the more-embodied sort
distillationally rendered through sincerely wrestling with difficult shadow material in a
caring gay-appreciative manner. One can ethically allow oneself to self-awarely scream
bloody murder at the bad breast Karen-mommy as symbol, after all, because it does feel
better to sincerely seek a fully-dimensionalized homosexual aliveness rather than stay one-
dimensionally dead about it. Indeed, it is so salutary constitutionally when that essential
gay vitality is more so corporeally present, as I can testify from bounteous personal growth
experience, that after a certain point in such healing self-recovery, the rejuvenated ground
of one’s psychological thought and feeling reciprocally starts singing back a melodiously-
moving recital of numinous gay love in a salubriously-tangible intimacy of integrally-
encountered reconnection, which marvelously-heartening endorsement is a homosexual
person’s natural but likely quite-unfamiliar birthright, the better-encountered awakening of
an inner fey conscience that reassuringly says, like the empathic gay mommy we likely
never had, and like the attentive gay daddy we always deserved, that it’s OKAY to speak out
for a more valuable and daring truth about one’s same-sex-loving being, to yelp at stupidity
in others but mostly in oneself, at one-dimensionality, at heterosexism, at bodies shut-
down, at meaningful activist discourse mockingly reduced to codependent banality or
passive-aggressive hostility, that it is indeed not only morally okay but homosexually and
humanly noble to loyally and courageously challenge a worthy gay liberation movement
which is now at risk of dangerously losing its way, but which is for the same reason
presently at a critical juncture with another possible outcome to this growing crisis of gay
political meaning, thus a precarious and delicate, yet possibly precious, point in the
relatively primitive development of liberated homosexual personhood which we are here at
that may be hard to more proportionately recognize in the present beclouding immediacy of
the bustling historical moment, but which future, gayer aeons, if we intelligibly survive the
final challenging hour to choose more wisely at this most consequential juncture, will surely
queerly thank us for.

Summary Conclusion to My Statement

In this blog statement, I have tried to reply judiciously to some malignant comments
made about me by LGBT-community journalist Karen Ocamb when she reported in
Frontiers in L.A. on a February 2009 public demonstration I was part of, and more so in
her related personal blog commentary on the incident that also aired her unresolved
gripes in regard to AIDS activist and acapela singer/gay-icon Michael Callen, whose
final illness and death some 15 years before I helped Michael deal with by running a
round-the-clock care group for him and of which Karen was a member during the last
few months.
 
  54

In responding to Karen’s dubiously vigorous skepticism about most if not all matters
importantly related to me and other concerned gay-centered psychological activists with
whom I am associated, I thought to take a few steps back from the Karen drama
specifically to clarify why we protestors were there to begin with, demonstrating against
the version of Radical Faerie history being presented by longtime community leaders
Don Kilhefner and Mark Thompson on that February Sunday.

We were perturbed that Don, with Mark’s help, was yet again articulating the
manipulative Radical Faerie origin story he has been peddling for some time, a
revisionist tale that distortionally ensconces him as preeminent founder with Harry
Hay, because this manipulative maneuver unilaterally disappears the important
phenomenology of a powerful early Radical Faerie schism in which he played a major
historical part by following fellow co-founder Mitch Walker’s pioneering psychological
lead of the time, all of which matters have to do with pressing current issues about gay
liberation and its better future. Now Don says nothing about this previous close
affiliation with Mitch and with Mitch’s ideas or the history involved, so crucial not only
to present controversies but to the specific kind of professional and activist person he
since then has himself become. And, furthermore, people who look up to Don’s lead,
including I’m sure many of his regular readers, then tacitly follow suit into this self-
serving badland of dishonest distortions. Such a twisted rewriting of the past, and then
its attempted mass concretizing, we protestors were concerned, particularly given Don’s
community cachet and consequent access to the main gay newsmagazine in town and to
other outlets, would end up committing a terrible disservice to the pathbreaking vision
of gay-centered inner work associated with and inaugurated by Mitch’s novel synthesis
of gay liberation with Freud/Jung starting in the mid-1970s, which is what he was
bringing to Harry and the other founding Faeries from the start. The multi-dimensional
account being innovationally and so far uniquely developed by Mitch and interested
associates ongoingly as to how same-sex-loving peoples today might progressively better
enter into the initiatorily-numinous world of generative homosexual psyche through
effectively sought out and modulated shadow descent, undertaken therapeutically to
constructively confront the bad consequences of internalized heterosexism thoroughly
enough so as to alchemically best gain, within one’s valuably-growing feltness of
consolidated self-being, directly enhanced access to the tangibilizingly-present,
archetypal “god” of gay-centeredness (an ancient same-sex-loving shamanic idea,
actually)–such a forward-thinking, multi-dimensional account cannot be constructively
accessed by potentially-interested gay people towards enhanced homosexual
individuation if that account is so ignored and/or demonized publically that it then
cannot fairly be helpfully held forth or reasonably considered. All serious attempts to
enhance gay liberatory ingress to the magnificent storehouse of powerful self-knowledge
intrinsically resident to the aboriginal spirit of same-sex love ought to be respectfully
recognized and appreciatively considered as the “common property” of our homosexual
community, particularly as I believe the gay-centered psychological approach I have
been involved in developing and that Don and his associates have ignored and
demeaned, amounts to a crowning jewel in the contemporaneous era’s gay liberation
efforts to justly renew ancient same-sex-loving wisdom traditions in light of new historic
challenges and opportunities. By following that ethical sense of collective fairness, this
blog statement has tried to convey a more applicational form of gay-centering inner
 
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work than anything Don has yet to espouse, all of what he has had to say, so far, in the
end seeming neither terribly gay-centered nor sincerely depth psychological, especially
as concerns Don’s reticence to integratively discuss key Jungian concepts, such as the
shadow and the soul-figure, most tellingly in regard to himself.

I tried to ideationally highlight the loss to good homosexual progress deleteriously

incurred by such a limitational leadership deficiency through herein describing the
shadow idea as a formulational tool for constructively personifying the disagreeable
darkness cast by the gay ego’s self-defensive light, what amounts to a homosexual
individual’s gay moral inferiority as internally felt, and to suggest that a coming epochal
“new ethic” is now requiring a committed struggle by same-sex-loving persons to
subjectively own the inevitably bigotry-poisoned homosexual shadow as ultimately an
inner friend rather than to keep, on the one hand, internally repressing it, while on the
other, violently projecting or otherwise meanly acting out, often on other gay people,
this distaff psychic content which has virulently been most foully fed by many bigoted
centuries of anti-same-sex-loving holocaust.

I also tried my best to give a balanced view of the factual history in question related to
the Radical Faeries. To do this, I in part relied on “love” letters now rescued from
storage and written many years ago to Mitch Walker by Don Kilhefner when they were
intimately organizing together, letters honoring Mitch as a great visionary of the gay
movement and of the Radical Faeries as well as the main inspirer for Don to take his
own inner development as gay more seriously. I also relied on some political
philosopher/psychologist-type writers, in particular Herbert Marcuse, Erich Neumann
and Peter Dunlap, to back up my claim that how we “spin” or “doctor” reality can easily
become a fascist ploy to dictate that reality and control psyches. Political philosopher
Marcuse diagnosed the kind of white-washing or “effective suffocation” engaged in by
Don and the like as a form of “one-dimensional” thinking that operates totalitarianism
in modern, supposedly “democratic” peoples and times. Jungian analyst Neumann gave
me a rubric with which to better understand Karen’s attack on me, to see it as a
symptom of “the old ethic” whereby the problem of the personal shadow is
misaddressed (or not addressed) by disavowing the “evil within” and instead projecting
this disconcerting psychic content onto a scapegoated other (in my case as the recipient
of Karen’s hateful attack, then resulting in a fear of retribution from Karen/mommy that
I reckon wound up delaying the completion of this blog statement for almost a year).
Political psychologist Dunlap provided some authoritative grounding to develop the idea
that our age of gay community liberalism will lead us to eventual historical irrelevance if
we do not evolve to a new qualitative age of gay “psychological liberalism.”

I did my best to try to own my own violence and to “test for validity” by avoiding merely
polarizing with Karen (going so far as to say I have an inner Karen) and also by trying to
see the “Michael Callen story,” and the matter of how I “screamed” at her for her
unannounced officiating over a death-bed farewell between Michael and his parents,
from her point of view. I then proceeded to offer a line-reading of her blog statement
and to provide my version of the Michael story, where I maintained that he had already
gained sufficient closure with his parents by the end and was aiming towards a more so
gay-centered death that at that point intentionally only involved his trusted friends,
caregivers and his own encounter with the homosexual numinous. I shared how a close
 
  56

 
affectionate intimacy between him and me was smelted on his passionate and eroticized
desire for a better gay-centering taste of the homosexual eternal in studly form, which
then allowed us to work closely together in then almost successfully actualizing all his
most dearly-held terminal wishes.

It furthermore concerned me that both Don and Karen, each in his or her own way, in
the pertinent matters being explored here ended up being so bothered by the
immaturity of others (Karen, for example, climactically shames us protestors as
“Perennial Peter Pans”), when neither had lifted much of a finger to say anything
substantively positive about what real maturity entails for us same-sex-loving peoples.
What about, for example, the possibility of more-advanced sexual growth and
affectional healing in the human capacity for gay romantic intimacy as central life-long
benefits of persistent gay-centered inner work in ongoingly and enhancingly stoking the
homosexual individuation process? But, as perhaps my analysis shows, people like Don
and Karen are too caught mentally in their own versions of the gay shadow problem to
have much good eros left over. If one wants a better, less meanspirited movement, and
world, it seems to me, learning how to discover the particular ways in which a big
shadow problem (or internalized homophobia) might be infecting one’s same-sex-loving
eros such that one’s effective forward vision can’t really substantively evolve beyond
merely a baseline depression or crabbiness, no matter how hard one consciously tries to
seem more “on top of it” homosexually, is quite essential for the sake of gay personal
progress and for our freedom movement’s more positive evolution. In other words, the
personal is most certainly political and vice versa in the best intimately-interrelated
manner, procreatively and challengingly, in the case of total gay liberation!

In fact, if we can have learned anything important from Dunlap, Marcuse, and
Neumann in regard to the matter of leading the homosexual Good Life, it is that no
“objective” gay political problem is truly completely resolvable if it is not first and
foremost tackled psychologically, which is to say, subjectively. I cannot any longer just
point, and say “J’accuse” to somebody else about being heterosexist (without denying
objective evil). In fact, our overall moral and political framework concerning where
human problems can be said to be ultimately sourced and where they therefore have to
finally be “fixed” must fundamentally change not only for gays but everyone, if we are to
have any chance in hell of staving off the hell on earth being presently brought towards
us menacingly through mounting, unchecked shadow projections.

For we gay and lesbian folk, the ethical implications of the above comprehensions are
indeed powerful. Arbitration of what constitutes a morally-valuable existence can no
longer be effectively managed from within the rectitudinous code of a supposedly
reputable society long based on heterosexist principles, which is to say the old
psychological ethic of projection, denial and scapegoating. The scales of a new kind of
moral and factual justice for same-sex-loving folk must be operatively forged from an
indigenously-gay values system originating conscientiously through a psychic apparatus
that was born to be gay and therefore must learn to operate more consciously, logically
and feelingly in a progressively better gay-centered way. The psychic world of
homosexual archetypal patterning, through which an inherent same-sex-loving libidinal
“intelligence” can help further orient us developmentally, lies I believe in patiently-
attentive movement toward better gay actualizational fulfillment if we can but wisely
 
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extend our homosexual hand in brother (or sister)-like fashion to openly meet the
untamed unconscious interiorly on less repressive and, once and for all, more equal and
mutually-regardful, same-sex-loving terms.

Don’s overgrown cry-for-help implicitly present in his persistently pushing a

manipulated history that unfairly regales him as preeminent surviving Radical Faerie
founder, and Karen’s belated activational revealing of a punitive 15-years-long grudge
which I believe is principally sourced in her own undigested infantile hurt-rage, should
no doubt serve as illustrative object lessons about there being a great reservoir of
unconscious bad feeling still stewing inside all of us homosexual people. Ages of
heterosexist hate still resonate infectiously from somewhere deep inside like venomous
seepage from a buried toxic spill, even long after we have apparently well-enough
managed to better grow into meaningful adult life as proud gay persons in wholesomely
self-respecting communities, a corrupting and corroding, secretive pollution within now
sabotagingly feeding an often well-camouflaged wish for vitiating gay assimilationism.
Better that we more actively face the noxiously self-compromising situation causally
now building up historically through persistent oppression’s renewed and more-clever
collective attempt at still managing some sort of anti-homosexual genocide in the face of
apparent gay-lib success, than keep sticking our queer movement heads in the
dissociative sand about this looming basal threat, especially because it is, in the end,
only our greater sensual wholeness and estimable interior embodiment as valuably
homosexual and as good same-sex-loving persons, it seems to me, that we truly fear in
the historic problem vexingly at hand. Learning better how to constructively employ our
epoch-making eros to assertively befriend the crushed, lost fey child within us through
dedicated inner work guided by a gay-centering appreciation, even as we more overtly
wish only to think politically in extravert ways and thus to continue revengefully acting
out societal homophobia to contradictorily destroy or otherwise thwart ourselves and
one another through defensive repression, toxic shame, historical erasure and character
defamation—such a profound gay political reorientational step responsibly follows along
that forging same-sex-loving path enlighteningly revealed by the new psychological
ethos we have been here looking at, as well as homosexually involving the necessary
cultivation of that fresh technology practically needed to effectively use this new moral
compass to better reach the gay Good Life, to remuneratively attain a realizational sort
of homosexual “philosopher’s stone” that I bet our still-not-fully-freed people most
indelibly yearn for in their same-sex-loving heart-of-hearts, and increasingly now must
depend upon metaphorically gaining through enhanced subjective prioritization.

Perhaps there is an alchemically sacred and secretly accessed gift in existently being
meaningfully same-sex-loving that will decisively help us bountifully undertake as well
as more tangibly result from the grand, new, aeonic, gay activist work which I have
respectfully attempted to introductorily outline here in this somewhat-extended blog
discussion, a pressing rejuvenational effort organizationally which I believe to be quite
essential, and not just for our gay selves and freedom movement alone. If we sincerely
enter on this most daunting but daring of novel, futuristic endeavors, maybe in its
procreatively-unfolding course the genius or divine intelligence of that homosexual
giftedness which could enable our better success, will finally be gestationally revealed
inspirationally in a more direct truthfulness that marvelously lifts our own gay
developmental comprehension and same-sex-loving completion to a startling new order
 
  58

 
of fresh substantificational significance, qualitative satisfaction and contributive import
most so valuationally in needfully pressing regard to the upcoming fate of humanity and
the world at large.
                                                        

Endnotes

1Harry Hay, informed by the Marxist concept of validating peoples marginalized by unjust power,
developed the at-the-time quite novel idea (simultaneously also pioneered in Donald Webster Cory’s The
Homosexual in America [1951]) that gay people constituted their own ethnic minority. At last, oppressed
homosexuals of that era could begin claiming a culture and a legacy stretching back in historical time as
related to a variety of names (e.g., Mattachine; berdache; two spirit; gay; faerie). Mattachines were 13th
Century “fools” who espoused modern notions of romantic love and class revolution. Harry saw parallels
between today’s homosexuals and the Mattachines as well as to the Native American berdache or “two
spirit” being. Regular meetings of the Society in secret cells brought gay folk together who had been
injured by a bigotry and hatred almost inconceivable to many of us today in its blanket severity, beginning
the process of individual homosexual healing that was subsequently taken up most focusedly in the rise of
gay-affirmative therapy. Harry was learning to be passionately gay-centering before there was even an
American gay movement—and therefore of a newer and disturbing kind of political radicalism. One key
motif of being a homosexual, of course, is to disturb the status quo. Not so long after his Mattachine
Society won an important legal case and became a nation-wide movement, Harry was ejected by his group
for being too politically “red” and theoretically radical. But his better reconciliation with history was to
come with meeting a child of the hippie movement who was able to appreciate his writings as heralding a
new stage in gay liberation even beyond Harry’s own ken.

2 Indeed, complaints about Harry being imperiously domineering go back decades. In Behind the Mask of
the Mattachine (2006), author James Sears quotes fellow activist Jim Kepner referring to “Harry’s
dominating spirit” (p. 170), and Sears himself variously characterizes the Harry Hay of the early
Mattachine period as possessing an “irascible personality” (p. 162), an “aversion to take into account
views contrary to his own” (p. 164), an intimidating “bulldozer personality” (p. 165), a “stubbornness and
overbearing nature” which was “alienating” (p. 166), as well as an “imperious Marxist leadership style” (p.
167). C. Todd White, in Pre-Gay L.A. (2009) quotes Dale Jennings, the man who called Harry Hay from
jail one spring morning in 1952 to come bail him out on a vice charge that later became the basis of a
groundbreaking Mattachine court case, describing Harry as coercively wielding “the imperial self-
confidence of the chosen,” and mocking him as “The Great Man” (p. 24). I should also mention that I also
recall having read somewhere that Harry’s problematic personality had gotten him such animosity from
other members of the early Mattachine organizing group that he was eventually reprimanded by them and
wound up promising to take better responsibility for this issue in the future, but so far I have not located
the source of this recollection. I will continue looking, however, and hopefully I will uncover the
appropriate material by which I will then be able to adjust the last part of this note.

3 The reader may notice in going along that I repeatedly refer to several political theorists of a
psychological bent in my analysis to help clarify my argument about the problem of how mass-
mindedness in all its manifestations shapes and is also shaped by our unfinished psychologies in
pervasive and insidious ways that defensively maintain the status quo of unjust power relations
collectively in our society and individually in the inner workings of our complexes and object relations.
And while a vast literature exists that concerns a certain aspect of this dilemma of how “social discourse”
oppresses all bodies through invisible narratives of “knowledge” and “power”—I am thinking here of that
entire domain of ideation called variously “social construction,” “postmodernism” or “deconstruction,” of
whom critical theorist Michael Foucault is an influential spokesperson (see, for example, Foucault,
1963/1972, 1966/1970, 1977, 1976/1980)—I have largely avoided referring to this literature, in part due to
its anti-psychological bent sourced in an anti-humanism and anti-transpersonal orientation that is
derived from a post-Marxist-materialist suspicion of all things “essential.” (This is not to say that the

 
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postmodern orientation, as well as its attendant questioning of what we might here call a kind of “naïve
essentialism,” namely that regressive thought-form utilized by the right wing in the USA, is invalid,
especially if appreciated as a means to diagnose unjust power discourses in invisible social systems, as
long as this “social constructionism” does not collude with unanalyzed internalized homophobia to
discount the validity of numinous gay identity/eros as such). It is for this reason that I have embraced the
terms “gay,” “lesbian,” “homosexual” and “same-sex-loving” in this discussion in a judiciously-applied
transhistorical sense. It is also due to this reason that I have turned for political framing of my discussion
not to postmodernism but instead to a few select voices who have maintained an ability to value depth
psychology while looking at the ways in which our oppressed personal psychologies lead to oppression in
the political realm and vice versa. I have a particular fondness for voices from what is loosely termed the
“Frankfurt School of Philosophical Thought,” which arose from the Institute of Social Research in
Germany in 1923, then relocated to California in 1941. One of the major figures to emerge from this line of
thought that sought to politicize philosophy and psychology is Herbert Marcuse, whose Eros And
Civilization (1955) offers a re-reading of Freudian drive theory through a Marxist political lens (And if
read carefully, with an appreciative gay-centering sensibility, his book can be seen as a major celebration
of twinship homosexual love as providing the psychological antidote to a society become crazed by
unchecked capitalistic violence). His One-Dimensional Man (1964) is said to have laid out a theoretical
foundation for the New Left and student movements of the later 1960s. From another direction, Erich
Neumann’s work, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1969), if not influenced by the Frankfurt School
implicitly, seems to be the one Jungian effort of that period which is expressly concerned with unjust
power relations and how they maintain and arise from internal fascist states of mind (perhaps this has
something to do with Neumann being Jewish and his writing his book in Israel in the aftermath of WWII).
Peter Dunlap (2008) is a new figure to arrive on the scene and is discussed in this blog statement due to
the elegant way he builds on both Jung and Frankfurt School thinkers (among others, including
philosopher Ken Wilbur) to offer the first comprehensive statement on the growing need for all political
effort to become quite overtly psychological if we are to finally emerge from a relatively primitive,
increasingly problematic state of human mental life. There are a few additional voices I might have
included, such as Erich Fromm, also of the Frankfurt School, whose Escape from Freedom (1941), offers
an existential analysis as to why human beings fear their own agency and retreat to fascist forms of group
collectivity, but I thought that the basic political thought-forms I was interested in were included
sufficiently in Marcuse, Neumann and Dunlap, at least in this blog discussion’s preliminary form, to not
need to be more exhaustively referenced. It might have also been interesting to quote from the masters
themselves, such as Freud, Marx, Jung and Nietzsche, each of whom have important things to say about
how alienation from our essential psychology is a political problem.

4I have myself met and talked to Don on several occasions, by the way, but the only time I ever had a
substantial conversation with him was when I was interviewing for therapists in 1989. I thought he was
great at dream interpreting. I told him about a dream of travelling to Australia with my mother and he
said that I had to go into the underworld to wrestle with my mother complex—I don’t recall him being that
eloquent, exactly. Compared to Mitch, though, who I wound up with as my first serious therapist, I found
Don too dry in his thinking and, according to my classist inner kids, too bourgeois—not nearly shamanic,
or as in Mitch’s case, rabbinic, enough. I did, however, appreciate that he seemed to be attempting a gay-
centered Jungian approach, not realizing at the time that he had learned about this from Mitch.

5Here is one small example of what Don does with his “I started the Radical Faeries with Harry Hay”
charade. At the recent “faeposium 2: A Radical Faerie Conference, Urban Fathering, and Performance
Event,” put on by a host of Faerie organizations and RFD Magazine during the weekend of October 2-4,
2009 in San Francisco, Don gave a workshop entitled “The First Radical Faerie Gathering: The Vision,”
the blurb for which went this way: “In this workshop, Don will talk about the co-organizing with Harry
Hay of the first Radical Faerie gathering in the Sonora desert of Arizona over Labor Day weekend in 1979.
He will also speak about Harry and Don’s joint vision for the Radical Faeries and explore with the
participants of the workshop where we are now and the need for another national fathering of Radical
Faeries.”

 
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6 In order to focus my statement on the most pertinent of Karen’s accusations in light of the quite-
substantial space I feel is required for even that more-limited task, I will defer on replying to some of the
specific issues related to Mark Thompson she here raises, about which in a future extension of this blog
statement I may delve into more specifically than to point out at this time how awful Karen makes her
opponents seem in this area as everywhere else, and instead for now I will refer the interested reader to
Wendell Jones’ statements in this same blog, which more so address matters concerning Mark and his
break from the rest of us. 

7 Don uses the fact that, in the breakdown of organizing functions arranged by the founding Faerie group,
he took on managing many of the principal practical efforts in close consultative league with Harry (which
is a big reason he had been invited to join), in contrast to those functions taken up more specifically by
Mitch which did not involve Don, to then distortionally argue that Mitch “didn’t play as significant a role,”
a statement which badly trivializes the conglomerate and consensual depth of the original activist
formation that grew up around Harry and Mitch’s procreational bond as I have come to understand this
development, while it aggrandizes himself and the importance of his practical management functions.
8 Essentialist models of gay development formulated after the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 tell us gayness
is a living process that amounts to becoming increasingly more at home with being gay. What a simple
concept, but nonetheless a challenging endeavor only now just being studied effectively. Indeed, at first,
growing up with our heterosexist parents and society, gayness seems at least in some ways horribly
abnormal. This ingrained pathologizing tendency starts to mellow out the more one gets “turned on” by
those of the same sex and finds increasing support in the gay world. What was seen as sick becomes what
one quite normally craves. The desire for gay sex and romance becomes so mesmerizingly addictive that
the person slowly but surely gives up a lot of identification with the heterosexual world, now viewed as
oppressive, stultifying, even itself stupified. Then, after usually some great struggle, maybe including the
loss of relations with parents and friends, a person, in an act of great heroism still poorly understood,
bravely “comes out” first to self, then to others. The developing gay personality goes through a profound
death-and-rebirth metamorphosis of being and becoming, perhaps the greatest sort of transformation
anyone can undergo. Homosexual love is chosen over heterosexism. Coming out is an act of gay self-
realization and personal revolution, if perhaps the first stage. Nothing less than a kind of overall political
revolution is what is at stake here, because without a profound shift of power to the subjectivity of the
individual, as I will argue below, we human beings will not be able to survive as a species. The difference
between this progressive interiorizing worldview and the violent Marxist promulgations of the past is that
this vernal formulation suggests that the new terrain of change is within each individual MIND itself, in
overthrowing the false gods of heterosexism in the inner world of one’s “object relations,” which is a
psychoanalytic way of picturing inner psychodynamics (It should be mentioned that the gay “essentialist”
model being put forward here is currently contested by an attitude developed and espoused in the
academy called postmodern “social constructionism,” but I will not get into that debate here).

9The reader may wonder why I reference Nietzsche in such close association with the tradition of more
overt gay-centered thought. My doctoral dissertation (Sadownick, 2006) investigated how it was
reasonable to see Nietzsche as a gay man and to regard his eccentric masterpiece, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, as well as various of his other efforts, as pre-gay-liberation, pre-psychoanalytical
anticipations of what this discussion is calling “gay-centered inner work,” with the “overman” symbolic of
an intrapsychic archetypal homosexual “voice” or gay self-realizational “Greater Personality,” what Mitch
Walker would eventually call “Uranian Eros.” (For an interesting analysis comparing Nietzsche’s
homoeroticism to that of Whitman, see Stavrou, 1964).

10 I would like to additionally augment my analysis at this juncture by pointing out that in his
classic text,
The One-Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse, a leading proponent of the Frankfurt School, the
first sustained group effort to bring a revolutionary social change ethos to Freudian psychoanalysis,
provides a useful series of metaphors to help us understand how political and destructive the actions of
Don, Mark and Karen are not just to our own community but to society at large. Marcuse’s
conceptualizations have helped me personally explain to colleagues in the gay community and at my work

 
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place, Antioch University, why my friends and I decided to demonstrate against, of all people, Don and
Mark, individuals who, to untrained eyes, seem to be doing good gay community work. To this end, it can
help that Marcuse points an indicting finger at what he calls the “one-dimensional man,” a figure who is
so overcome by paralysis, or what we might call “toxic shame,” that he or she cannot tolerate intellectual
or any other self-criticism of any true depth, and who, by his or her consequent “alienation” (p. 9) from
the “inner dimension of the mind” (p. 10), overturns the two basic premises of life, “the judgment that
human life is worth living,” and that society should “exist for the amelioration of human life” (p. x).
Marcuse could well have been talking about Don, Mark and Karen when he says that one-dimensional
man promotes “one-dimensional thought and behavior” (p. 12, his italics) and that “the new mode of
thought” (p. 13) which is not thought at all but “publicity” (p.12) provides nothing to the consumer but “a
false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood” (p. 12). This is the form totalitarianism takes
in modern democratic times. Here “ideas, aspirations, and objectives” (Marcuse, 1964, p. 12) that
challenge the “established universe of discourse and action” (p. 12) are “either repelled or reduced to
terms of this universe” (p. 12) not through physical terror but through a fear of loosing membership in the
social collective such that “mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of
this universe” (p. 18). 

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