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Utah Gay Men's Health Summit Keynote
by Bo Young, White Crane's Publisher
I would like to begin by opening a circle here.
I call to the spirits of the East, the place of bright warm beginnings as we set out on this journey of learning today. Bless this gathering with curiosity and wisdom.
I call to the spirits of the South, the place of the warm, noon-day sun, of companionship, of brotherly love.
I call to the spirits of the West, the place of the setting sun, death and dying, of the very real lessons our community has learned from these teachers.
I call to the spirits of the North, the place of the ancestors, to guide us and watch over our work.
I call to the spirits of the sky, the place of infinity and connection.
I call to the spirits of the Earth, the mother that we are all carried by, that we all walk on; the place of abundance.
And I call to the spirit of the Great Mystery the Great Unknown in all of us.
Good morning.
If there is anything that’s sure to give me the heebie jeebies, it’s the thought of getting up in front of a room full of people and speaking. And if there’s any risk of being perceived as an “authority” in that, my first impulse is to run from the room.
The only thing on which I am an authority is being Bo Young, and the jury is still pretty much out on that, too. I will say to you before I start, as we do in the pages of White Crane, what I say here is true for me, even for many people. Nevertheless, I offer it to you with only the suggestion that you take what works for you, what you need, and leave the rest behind.
I am going to occasionally be interchangeably using terms like “gay” or “homosexual” as I speak. In a way this is pure laziness because there are more accurate words to be used like “same-sex love. ” But even while this may be more accurate, more precise, I still find it a little clunky. The real problem isn’t my personal vocabulary, but with the language we use in general, and English specifically. English is essentially a masculinized language and as an Ojibwe elder Wub-E-Ke-Niew explained to me late one night, it is impossible to express some ideas in a language that represents only half the world, in a language that, unlike his own Native Ojibwe tongue, only expresses a male perception and view of the world. And as I hope you will see, language is an important part of understanding.
A few years ago, a wonderful book came out called The Four Agreements. Perhaps you heard of it, maybe you even read it. The Four Agreements are simple enough: Be Impeccable with Your Language, Take Nothing Personally, Make No Assumptions, and Always do your Best.
But there is an even more powerful idea in that book. Miguel Ruiz challenges each of us, just as Joseph Campbell’s message does in his stories of the Hero’s Journey, to test all the assumptions that are handed to us. He speaks of becoming “undomesticated. ” Becoming undomesticated means that we need to reexamine our lives in the smallest detail and apply our own critical thinking, our own criteria to each and every part of it, even, sometimes, those things that seem simple, that we all assume to be true. This is never an easy thing to do. What he is suggesting is that each one of us goes back and questions every brick of the foundations of our personal lives.
Unfortunately we live in a time when, as gay people, our very lives, the very core of who we are as people, is under attack at the highest levels. Looming threats of Constitutional amendments are used to further separate us from the community and to divide the country. On a very personal level, almost every of us has had to contemplate the loss of family and friends as we became undomesticated enough to allow that perhaps we might be one of those men-who-loved-other-men. Our employment might possibly be at stake. In a very real way, gay people’s lives are under a great threat each and every day in this country. And out of this there is another, more insidious influence that can be an obstacle to becoming undomesticated.
Following World War II when the prisoner of war camps were liberated the soldiers discovered a phenomenon which was very perplexing. Some prisoners seemed to have surrendered more than their bodies to the enemy. They appeared to have forgiven and even defended their captors and in some cases, taken on, in horrifying ways, many of the characteristics of their captors. The phenomenon was also observed in Stockholm, Sweden a short time later when hostages in a bank robbery began defending their kidnappers and refused to testify against them in trial. It was even named after this event, becoming known as The Stockholm Syndrome.
The Stockholm Syndrome, was most famously demonstrated in recent times in the kidnapping and captivity of Patty Hearst who went from Bay Area heiress and debutante to machinegun-toting, bank-robbing revolutionary under the influence of the Symbionese Liberation Army who had kidnapped her and locked her up for weeks in a closet. They subjected her to rape, verbal abuse and physical deprivation. In what has now become understood to be a primal attempt at self-preservation and survival, Ms. Hearst became a mirror of her captors, dressing, acting and talking in a manner just like them, so as to say, "See? I'm just like you. So don't kill me." She was under the very stressful influence of the Stockholm Syndrome and even pled this in her defense, to no avail.
It is my suggestion to you that a variation on this same idea is now seen in the thinking of the modern gay and lesbian civil rights movement, and to disastrous effect for all concerned. I think it is expressed most commonly in the form of "See? We're just like you (we want to be married and have children and we work hard and have mortgages) except for what we do in bed. So don't discriminate against us; don’t kill us." I think this has serious implications for modern gay people, that extends into psychology, sociology and spirituality. I call it the Sexual Stockholm Syndrome.
I don’t really like to pathologize these things. There’s an element of “blaming the victim. ” But, fortunately, like HIV, the Sexual Stockholm Syndrome is a disorder…a dis-ease, if you will…that can be avoided with the right information. Unlike HIV, it can actually be cured. In this case, the information—the cure—is our own history as same-sex loving people. Unfortunately, history is usually the story told by the winners and for unfortunate people like gays and lesbians and American Indians and Africans, to learn your own history, often you need to dig a little deeper, read between the lines. But it’s there.
As I have explored and investigated the various cultures that have incorporated same-sex peoples in their societies, I was finally and profoundly struck with how universal it is. We really are everywhere. We also happen to be doing the same work in almost every place you look! It takes different forms from culture to culture—and individual peoples might not recognize the forms it takes in other cultures. But by and large, there is a remarkably uniform role for same-sex loving peoples.
Once I moved out of the sphere of influence of the arid religions that were birthed in deserts, I began to find a great deal of agreement about who and what same-sex people are. There is an immediate broadening of the mythic view. People from climates where there were cycles of annual fertility, had religions that were seasonal and balanced and as a result had not just a God, but a Goddess, too.
The Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, all arise from these patriarchal, desert cultures of the Middle East. In their shared worldview, the worst thing that could befall you is to offend the patriarch and be cast out of the nurturing oasis provided by the Lord’s beneficence.
Nature to them was an understandably harsh reality; there might not be enough for everyone, you might be expelled from the garden life into the desert and that could mean only death. “Nature, ” and all it stands for (including the pregnant power of women—“Mother Nature, ”) became something that had to be subdued, overcome, controlled and conquered. Simply put, these religions believe that they have been expelled from “the Garden. ” To return they must assuage an angry Lord and Master, ruler/owner, dominator of all he surveys.
Coming from a modern, democratic republic, “king” and “lord” are, at best, archaic terms for me They are not notions that speak to me anymore. I do not believe that the Creator is a man or even has gender. Whenever we are dealing with religion, we are dealing with mythology. And I no longer feel I can be psychologically or spiritually blackmailed by the snake oil mythology of Original Sin, the spiritual elixir for which can only be found in Jesus or whoever. And what follows quickly on the teetering high heels of what might well be hubris, is that I no longer feel the need to be saved!
Like the fertile cultures and religions that saw the cycles of seasons and the birth, flourishing, ripening and dying cycles of the world around them, I no longer believed that I had been thrown out of any garden. A veil had been lifted from my eyes and as I look around I realize I still live in a garden. Desert spirituality no longer makes any sense to me. I look around at the lush and fertile North American continent and find not threatening Nature, but a nurturing Mother. A place that not only bears fruit, from sea to shining sea, but renews itself each year, and with it, me. I need only to open myself up to her and she shows me the way.
My understanding is that all spirituality is geomantic. That is, it arises from a vernacular, a language that is based in the geography and biology of our lives. The medium is, in a very basic way, the message. Because of this, and because I am of the North American continent, I have come to look to American Indian ceremony and ritual, and specifically the Two Spirit traditions, to find a spirituality of the cyclical and balanced nature in which we live. It is only one example of what you can find if you do a little reading. And there are many modern Biblical scholars that would argue that similar ideas exist in Christianity, as well. Will Roscoe’s newest book, Jesus and The Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love is a particularly good example. Aramaic scholar Neil Douglas Klotz is another in his Prayers of the Cosmos.
I am not saying we are the same as these ancestors, but that their lives are patterns and lessons that are of value to us as gay and lesbian people. They are in a very real way our ancestors.
I do believe that one must approach traditions and myths with abject humility and modesty and prepare to spend a great deal of time simply watching and with the close guidance of an appropriate teacher. And in doing so I have been exposed to marvelous experiences.
I have sat in circle with elders. I have learned about Pipe, sweat lodge and the animal spirits. I’ve learned there are four directions, then six, and even seven to be called upon. I’ve sat naked in a forest with nothing but a blanket for days and a time, crying for a vision to guide my path, talking to rocks and spiders and watching the trees kaleidoscope into forms and faces. I have listened to the birds tell me when it was time to leave and I have slept in the arms of the Mother as she held me through a moonlit night, a naked animal among the other naked animals in the garden. I’ve learned these things slowly, sometimes painfully, over the period of years by watching and listening and paying attention and respect to the ancient ways, sometimes in a language that I do not speak, but I come to understand. To further confuse matters, some of what I resonate to seems to have a distinct Celtic ring to it. I think this is because of my equally unavoidable biology and DNA as an individual of Irish-Eastern European extraction. This seeming contradiction and the ability to bring the two together in a coherent fashion—if I do—is at the very core of the Two Spirit tradition.
These were people who lived so much in concert with their environment as to appear to be primitive to the hierarchical, must-control-Nature-at-all-costs eye of the Europeans who first encountered them. Europeans first arriving here walked through meadows and forests and never recognized them for the farms they were to the people who lived here. When they encountered men who dressed like women, they only had words like “hermaphrodite” and “berdache” to inaccurately describe them.
These aboriginal societies were, by no means, perfect societies, and I am not suggesting the “noble savage” view of these cultures at all. But in virtually every one of the aboriginal North American nations there were individuals who were homosexual, who engaged in same-sex loving relationships. Will Roscoe’s The Zuni Man-Woman and The Changing Ones are brilliant histories of berdache/two spirits. As contemporary gay and lesbian Indians make greater and greater liberations with their own culture we are slowly discovering more stories of same-sex peoples in their culture and history, men and women.
These individuals were, more often than not, respected members of their societies. Living separately from the rest of the tribe, usually, they were identified as special, often in early childhood and they were trained. That this identification might happen in childhood is an indication that this was seen to be a natural, innate talent that only needed to be nurtured under the guidance of the elders. Their recognition was considered to be a special blessing on their families and communities. These individuals, such as Roscoe’s Zuni We Wha, were the people to whom children were sent to be educated and to whom everyone went for spiritual counsel and dispute resolution.
These were the intermediaries and the counselors and the teachers. Identifiable because they wore articles of clothing and/or had their hair in male/female ways, or perhaps seemed a little effeminate, the men of the tribe would consult with these winkté, these lhamana, these nádleehi—names from Lakota, Zuni and Navajo respectively—and, in the process of this consultation, would have sex with them. Not sex in the getting-your-rocks-off way, but as a “gifting” of the shaman for his services with the potent semen as the gift. Roscoe calls this the “sacredness of sames. ” And indeed, virtually every great Plains chief had two spirit spouses along with their wives. You will have the pleasure of hearing my dear friend Clyde Hall speak on these traditions later on in this conference.
Two spirits were frequently taken along on hunting and war parties because they were thought to lend a certain civility to the proceedings. If, in the course of the people’s migrations, they happened upon another tribe of people, it would be the winkté, the lhamana, the nádleehi who would be called on to make the initial contact, because they could be counted on to have more tact, more savoir faire. No ceremony, no ritual could be carried on without their involvement, and indeed, leadership. They were the only people who were allowed to change these traditions in any way, as well.
These people were “between the worlds, ” between the spirit world and the physical world and as such they were seen to be spiritual and social bridges. They were considered “not male, not female” and held a special place. It was the Two Spirit who would know how to look at the “big picture” to take two seemingly disparate ideas and bring them together and create something new.
This all started to sound very familiar to me. Ceremony or Broadway…things usually go better with gay sensibility injected into them. It is practically an article of faith that the arts and the theater would be impoverished without gay people. It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith or scholarship to see parallels. Even though if we could suddenly materialize these ancient people to modern New York or Salt Lake and show them how we relate as gay men today, they probably would be completely confused and would never equate what they did with what we do sexually. But I think they would recognize us culturally. And it is not simply a historic concept, either. There are two spirits among us today. The tradition lives.
Politically it is very prickly to use the term Two Spirit if you are not American Indian. But the point is, if I am trying to reconnect with the planet, with the Mother, with nature, then we are all human beings asking the same questions and it should come as no surprise that we get pretty much the same answers now that they did 1000 years ago.
While the form and function of same-sex roles have been diverse and wide-ranging over the centuries, if I step back for a second and in the true nature of a Two Spirit, look at the patterns and the connections—rather than the differences and the separations—then very clear, inescapable models start to emerge. And when I look around at the gay men and lesbians you know, I see us still carrying on the traditions, evolving as we go, and changing in how we relate to one another, perhaps, but not to culture and society. I see the artists, teachers and priests. Doctors, nurses, caretakers, counselors and therapists. Clowns, jesters, contraries and cross-dressers. I see the good sons and daughters even in the face of revilement and rejection.
While who I am as a modern gay man is in significant ways different from the nádleehi, the winkté, the lhamana, the lessons of same-sex love and connection are clearly there to nurture us today. I am someone who is between-the-worlds, betwixt. And it has been in the loss—the denial to us and by us—of this understanding that we are left a little bit lost, bothered and bewildered.
In the traditions of the North American Indians we are all relations—two-leggeds, four-leggeds and winged creatures—and those who are older than we are all our fathers and mothers, our grandmothers and our grandfathers. Harry Hay started telling us all since 1950 that we are a separate people, gifted in ways that are unique to us as a homosexual people. The aboriginal peoples of North America, who Harry studied with extensively, as well as virtually all of the other pagan cultures of the world, have always known this simple fact: We are not simply what we do in bed. In fact, Harry insisted it may be the only place we are the same, all plumbing aside.
Harry Hay insisted even more simply and scientifically, citing none other than Darwin, that nothing prevails in Nature, nothing survives in Nature that doesn’t serve Nature. It’s not simply that only the strong that survive, it’s the useful that survive. And therefore there must be some purpose that same-sex feeling survives, there must be some purpose or homosexuality would not continue to exist, across time and across species.
There are clues all around us and in our history to guide us.
All I need to do is open my eyes and my mind to receive the wisdom. I’ll know it when I see it. The only signposts are my guts and my mind and my heart and my soul. And when I come across a truth, they resonate like a tuning fork, sounding together as one, because, in fact, we are one.
It is good to know your role and even better to know how to play it. It is good to be betwixt. It is a place of unique insight and outlook, perspective and wisdom. And it is that unique perspective that has always made people like us valuable to cultures that recognized our abilities.
We ignore it at our own peril. Society ignores it at its own peril.
That is the simple solution to the Sexual Stockholm Syndrome. Instead of trying to convince ourselves and everyone else that we’re all alike—because we’re not, really, how boring would that be? —we simply need to understand how we are different and what our place is and have the guts to acknowledge it, to ourselves and to the world.
The price of drifting through a culture without a place is all too evident as we look around us today. Consumed by the consumerist culture and spit out as Calvin Klein models and Queer Eye entertainment, we are reduced to perpetually unattainable objects of desire. Sexual objectification is not liberation. Too much in gay male culture you see the empty bewilderment and the separation that results from this marginalization. It’s so easy for men, especially gay, white men, to stand there and insist that they’re just like the heterosexual culture all around them, when we all know now that they’re nothing more than Patty Hearsts, slavishly dressing the part and becoming Tonyas. And when you begin to understand it as a survival technique it becomes a little easier to understand. Further, as I came to understand that our unique role was always to see the connections and the commonalities between disparate ideas and people, I can begin to understand why it is almost anathema to ask that these same people take ownership of their differences, if just for a moment, to appreciate them. But it is critical that we do so.
And more importantly, I think it isn’t hard to see how it impoverishes the society that has pretensions to “family values” but is reduces even that to nothing more than a collection of market niches. In the end, it is for all of us, the world, that we must assert our place. And we must do in not by saying “see how much we are like you” but in claiming and embracing our unique gifts and history.
We have it in our innate ability to return the world, or more in the manner of our ancient tradition, to reconnect the world to its relation with the Mother, the Earth, the abundance and the coherent wholeness of which we are all a part. To appreciate the diversity that exists and the real need for it.
In many ways, as two spirited, betwixt, bridge people—and just being gay does not automatically entitle you to call yourself Two Spirit—these roles not only can be self-defined, they must be. We tend towards certain roles that are echoed and repeated through the ages. I mentioned counselor, teacher, shaman and priest, but we have also been the clowns, making sure that no one takes themselves too seriously, Heyoke, Kokopelli, the Divine Fool, the contrary and jesters and the costumed and masked societé joyeaux of the Middle Ages, among them the Mattachine Society that Harry used as the source for his own Mattachine Society back in 1950.
We are not marginal people; and we are not merely masters of imitation of the way they’d like to see the world. We are certainly not merely a lifestyle. We rise again as the in-between peoples. No longer bewitched, bothered and bewildered, we must now assert our strengths in the gentle way of what the Navajo call “walking in beauty. ” We must learn who we were so we can become who we are.
We are, as we always have been, the people who carry the culture of the world from generation to generation. We are the Mother’s special children. We are the people who see the patterns. We are the bridge people of the world.
Delivered at the Utah Gay Men's Health Summit - October 24, 2004 - Salt Lake City, Utah
at Wolf Creek, OR
