the ground is shifting under Pagan gender

You may have heard by now about the continuing, repeating controversy about PantheaCon and rituals excluding transwomen, or more specifically the one led by Z Budapest this year.

I wrote about this subject a year ago, and if you followed the subject then (involving PantheaCon again) you’ll know that it was about a lot more than rituals designed for people with specific bodies. I’m not going to requote the hurtful, insulting, deeply wounding and ideologically driven outburst of Z Budapest, which she posted in response to criticism of women being turned away at the door because they were trans. You can find it quoted on various blogs, and it was, as T Thorn Coyle described it, hate speech, an aggressive and devaluing attack against an entire group of people for what they simply are.

I can’t say that I had high expectations of Budapest, but I now realize that something in me could not quite believe that a year later she would not have retracted, acknowledged or apologized for her public attack on transwomen. Either that, or organizers of events would take on board that we really do have a moral problem here. Instead she apparently returned to PantheaCon and held a ritual for “all women present”, with the appended proviso “genetic women only”. And when you figure in that this was a return to the scene of the first controversy, and that there had been no apology for her written attack on transwomen, that’s pretty much like those charming signs they used to hang in pub windows: “no blacks, no Irish”. Inevitably it would look like: “I can do this, and I don’t even have to explain my previous behaviour”.

Inevitably people would ask: why did PantheaCon let her do this? And while running such an enormous and dynamic festival is a challenge which I’m sure the organizers do incredibly and with amazing hard work, it’s a question they will have to answer. Doing the work of making things happen is never a thankful task, and I think people should hear their story, but the talk is going to have to come and the question is serious. The talk can’t wait another year.

In addition to the questions, anger and scrutiny raised by this, I’ve heard a lot of excusing, wavering, and holding back, a lot of defending Budapest for her “right to express her beliefs”, her “freedom of religion”, the right to exclusive space etc. There were a number who felt the need to “hold neutral space” between Budapest’s ritual and those sitting in silent meditation (not even “protest”) outside, the latter led by T Thorn Coyle. I can’t help feeling that this “holding of space” was misguided. Surely it is injustice that needs healing, not the recognition of it? Inevitably these “holding neutral space” actions would look like attempts at protecting Budapest from the silent meditators, which just appears perverse and bizarre. This also seems confirmed by this account, whatever the intentions or perceptions of the “holders”.

As for the suggested defenses and justifications of Z Budapest holding her ritual in the way she did, where she did, these really miss the point, and buy into the justifications which Budapest blew pretty definitively with her all too revealing outburst last year. This wasn’t about separate space, the sanctity and autonomy of a tradition, or religious freedom. That last one particularly makes me cringe, like where have I heard religious freedom used as a justification for  denying equality before? Too often is the answer. I fear there is just a little muddled thinking and moral cowardice in some of the appeals for peace and healing at the expense of the disempowered and wronged. We need to stand up for transfolk, not attempt to explain how someone with a lot of clout might have their own perspective when they act out their prejudice.

A witness of the meditation outside the ritual can be found here. The accounts of the situation that I personally found most thoughtful and clear were those of Thorn Coyle here, here and here.

I have never been to PantheaCon and am unlikely to go anytime soon, as I am about 5,000 miles away, but these events and issues hit deeper and further than geographical location. I feel a sense of heaviness and sadness from the human failure that has been put in focus by events at PantheaCon two years running, and by Z Budapest’s abusiveness. But the fact that this has raised awareness, and produced shock and response from the international Pagan community also bears hope with it.

I know some people would find this statement melodramatic, but I feel that these events signal the end of an era, one which has dragged on too long. Equally something new has made its presence felt.

These events and personalities will pass, but dreams with a fresher sense of freedom and justice and equality have proven themselves alive.

Rosa Parks isn’t moving from the front of the bus.

Athena. Attic red-figure lekythos: photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen - used under creative commons 2.5 license

A free e-book that may be of interest:  Gender and Transgender in Modern Paganism

State religion? wtf

I live in the UK and grew up here, in what is a secularized society in practice, with considerable progress made thanks to the percolation of secular humanist, liberal values through society. I’m sure the mechanism of developing those values has been complex, but I think that is broadly accurate.

This is basically a rather agnostic country, pragmatically somewhat sleepy on belief, slow to examine the fine print of abstract principles, pretty much “whatever” on religion. Socially it’s really pretty good in a lot of ways, and I’m proud of the advances for various kinds of civil rights that the UK has established where it has done so. We honestly have come a long way.

You can easily forget that we actually have a sorta State religion; I say sorta because the Church of England is the “established” church in England (but not the UK as a whole), which according to the BBC religions website means that the Church performs official functions, is headed by the Monarch (yeah, this gets weird), and that there is a link between Church and State.

Now when you’ve worked out the implications of all that, please tell me, but it’s mind boggling to me that we officially link Church and State in this way, in a modern democracy where many people are not Christian (and more barely think about it), and secular humanist values have shaped so much of our lives.

It gets even more complicated when you take into account that due to the defunct British Empire as was, the Church of England is part of the wider “Anglican Communion”, which at times seems like a real nightmare of bigotry which the C of E seems to feel a need to “hold together” whatever the moral implications of what they are accommodating.

This strange child of Christianity, monarchy, empire and now outdated indigenous sentiment is secured a unique place in “British life”, one which to my knowledge no one is ever asked to consent to. The question is should it have that place? Actually more than that, how can it?

I think most British people would not agree to religion and political power being combined, however much they value spirituality and its hopefully sobering effects on power. But in a typically British fashion, things just “grew that way”, or so we assume without too much examination. Of course they didn’t really just grow that way, but were the result of a series of historical processes, some quite discontinuous.

Bizarrely we seem to do better than the USA, a country with a precedent for separating Church and State, having no State religion, and possessing a written bill of rights, in terms of fending off the influence of retrogressive, political religion. But senior figures from the Church of England continue to consistently  oppose full civil rights for LGBT people, and support bigots in their fight against equality legislation. Meanwhile they “grapple” with the issue of whether bishops without penises is just too much for them.

Now I’m a great believer in “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but equally an antique is not always a thing of beauty and use. Whatever the virtues and vices of the Church, is it not time we pulled the plug on the bizarre, anachronistic link between Church and State? Not in favour of links with multiple religions (which I consider matters of individual choice and definition), but in favour of a consistently secularised society which puts human rights first.

photo by David Rimeš. In public domain.

Nostalgia

I think I am definitely getting to an age where looking back on the past doesn’t so much happen, as surge into your life at times with a surprising power of yearning and delight. Not for who you were, but for what the experience of a time was like. It’s something which is certainly nudged on by the death of certain famous people from your youth, because when you are young enough these people are like gods that would live forever in a world lit by the same quality of light.

Such was the case recently when the British film director Ken Russell died. I loved Ken Russell and his films, and I associate them with the gleeful passion of the late sixties to seventies. He was iconoclastic and brave and serious about sensuality and opening up to vision. He understood that cinema was magic I’m sure. In that world “artist” was not an ironic word, and personal, direct experience changed lives and drove them in search of meaning and answers. Cinema, like television, was a democratic medium by virtue of distribution and replication (and Ken started off in TV as a film maker). His artistic heroes were human and fallible and extraordinary, and ordinary people were poetic. We watched “The Music Lovers” after his death, and it was so obvious that nobody made films like this anymore. In fact nobody ever made films quite like Ken, but it’s difficult to imagine anything remotely like his films being made now, which isn’t to say that something as good couldn’t be made, but conditions are different, and so are audience expectations. We were, relatively speaking, cultural virgins then.

Another thing we saw recently (with gentler effect) was a documentary from 1971 called The Power of the Witch. This had a lot of unintentionally funny bits, but was certainly interesting to see now, featuring interviews with people like Doreen Valiente, Eleanor Bone and the Sanders, all figures from the development of modern Witchcraft. I think most touching was the quality of the people interviewed who often seemed rough, idiosyncratic and unencumbered by a sense of style which modern media sensibilities seem to decree as needing to be slick, or exhibiting attitude. On film these people were less of a performance than the average person speaking on a mobile phone is nowadays.    The documentary looked quaint now, part Hammer Horror, part village policeman, part earnest and respectful. It’s a subject which could still have a good documentary made about it, but I can imagine the allure this had at the time.

Both TV and film have become far more a matter of personal choice nowadays, and I think that has changed how the medium works. DVDs, satellite and cable TV channels and online streaming means you really don’t have to be watching what the rest of the national population is watching at all. How it used to work was if you wanted to see a film you had to go to the cinema and watch it with other people in a large, darkened movie theatre. If it wasn’t at your cinema, you didn’t get to see it until it came on TV, when the premier was a big deal. Films were enormous, and not just a matter of entertainment. The 70s was also a great time for independent film making. As for TV, we used to have a max of three channels (actually two in our household till the mid 70s).

What all this meant was that when you were seeing something, so were a whole lot of other people at about (or exactly) the same time. Film and TV had a real impact on the collective psyche; something that flopped really flopped and could disappear without trace, but “getting through” to broader consciousness was also more definitive. The TV play was a real art form in which the medium was part of the message, because it was part of how it worked.

When “The Naked Civil Servant” screened in 1975 it really made a big impression. When something made a big impression on TV (especially a controversial one) there would be people talking about it at work or school the next day, it would be in the papers, interviews would probably follow, and so on. In short it entered into national life and could significantly shift a little bit of that life. Other plays worked a bit more like modern media, having a big impact on a minority of people who remembered them (eg Penda’s Fen and Stone Tape for me), however as there was not the option of repeat availability and sharing (Penda’s Fen is still unavailable except for poor quality pirated versions), these tended to get carried as memories of the experience of having first seen them, which tended to intensify their natures.

I am certainly glad that choice has opened up and I can now select what I want to watch (I didn’t give up having a TV for twenty years for nothing!), and I’m also glad that it is so much easier to make a low budget movie or record and get it to its self selected audience without losing out and disappearing entirely in the attempt. But when it was good you knew damn well the old style TV and film was not just changing your world, but changing a load of other people’s worlds at the same time, and that now seems unique to a time when a relatively newly established medium was open to breakthroughs and eccentric voices and visions, and a particular kind of reflection going on between artists and the public at large.

I can’t help looking back at Ken and thinking “yes! we did it”, even though it was him and his crews who did it. But we all felt a part of it somehow. That’s what I remember those times doing. And somehow he’ll always be there, in some better, more interesting part of our psyche.

still from "The Devils" by Ken Russell - click on image for source page

my most popular posts of 2011

Well according to WordPress these were my five most popular posts of 2011:

• 1 the choice within anger  March 2011
• 2 Pagan transphobia – no, you can’t pretend it’s hip anymore March 2011
• 3 “Man seeking Man”  July 2010
• 4 Gods, goods and shadows  January 2011
• 5 sex, pornography and human community  January 2011

It was interesting that the single most popular post was about the transformation of anger, and questioning how anger as a compelling emotion could be looked at consciously. I guess anger is something that affects everybody, and we’re all looking for answers to that one way or another.

The post about Paganism and transphobia is one that continues to get hits, with people looking for the sparking events of that controversy in their searches (see below). I think it would be fair to say that this recent breaking of trans-issues in modern Paganism did hit a nerve, and something there isn’t going away, which I think is a good thing.

Another topic that people have kept looking for on my blog is the short film “Man Seeking Man” and its main actor Asko Sahlman, which again is pleasing as it’s a gem of a little movie on a hard subject, and Asko gives a great performance.

“Gods, Goods and Shadows” got a lot of hits thanks to its being chosen for inclusion on the MetaPagan blog aggregator, for which I thank Cat Chapin-Bishop of Quaker Pagan Reflections. This post did not sustain hits long term, but I’m glad it got read a little more widely as it’s one of the posts that I am particularly happy with.

“Sex, Pornography and Human Community” came in number five, and who knows how many people clicked on this for the right reasons lol. I hope they enjoyed it in any case – pornography or things considered “pornographic” are and have been valued parts of people’s lives for a long time, and I wished to separate out how we treat people under capitalism from other issues of the sexual and moral heresies of erotic appreciation. I hope it gave a slightly different take on things.

The most popular searches were:

- man seeking man short film

- hairy gods

- z budapest transphobia

- asko sahlman man seeking man

- damian abraham bear

Most of these I’ve mentioned above, but I’ll add that I’m delighted that people search for hairy gods, and also for Damian Abraham (something of a hairy god himself) who deserves it in so many ways, both as a performer of great heart, and a lovely guy.

Anyway, that was it for 2011. Thanks to all who visited my blog, I hope you enjoyed it, and a very happy 2012 to you all!

“Janus” by Wolfgang Sauber (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

newborn

Here we are at the Winter Solstice again, and for a lot of Witches this is thought of as a time of rebirth of the light, of the Sun which has sunk as near to the horizon in its daily course as it will go, bringing short days and long nights with it, now to begin its climb back to the heights which it will reach next Summer.

This year when I thought on “the child” I was reminded of the wondrous, hopeful and free qualities of childhood and I realized that, contrary to the more common iconography of popular Paganism, what I really perceived was a being quite free of any determined gender. That was real freedom and joyous relief. It reminded me of the essence of childhood, and of the essence of selfhood; creative, free and un-selfconscious.

This sense of the child I find very healing, and it reminds me of a freedom long forgotten, but not lost.

With so many suffering so much hurt and harm based upon whether they are seen as a man or a woman, followed by all the machinations of mind that follow those categories as they are projected, something that no one seems to escape, no matter how young or old or innocent, the light of the ungendered child was a sweet liberation. Not insignificantly, I simultaneously had a sense of how inner peace comes with the realization that one has raged enough at past hurt, that there comes a point when one has gone far enough in oneself, and that one now goes too far to continue, and this realization is an immense relief. I think we often need “the child’s” consciousness for this to happen.

Peace and laughter is alive and well.

Just one question though: if this really was “the child of promise”, why would anyone need to know if it was a boy or a girl or something different?

"The Sun" tarot design by Pamela Colman Smith and A.E.Waite

Forgiveness and remembrance

Throughout my spiritual searches a recurring theme that came up was that negative emotion was one of our biggest blocks, and the transformation of negative emotion was one of our key tasks for ourselves, as a species. That also went well with the realisation that the opening of the heart and the centrality of love was the big sun rise news that could turn our lives upside down, which is to say right way up in terms of reality.

All that being so, I had a long history of just not “getting” forgiveness. My mother used to say “you can forgive, but you can’t forget”, but that just never hit a right note with me. There was a taint of nursed hurt in that kind of statement,  of a wrong held onto, of holding out. Similarly when people say “yeah, well they’ll get their karma”. Nope, they have their karma already, and expecting the universe to enact your personal vision of human justice is not a universal or naturalistic view, it’s an expression of hurt. Letting go doesn’t come with conditions, that’s not how the physics works.

Hurt and bad experience does bad things to people. It distorts them if the reaction just follows the common emotional course. Resentment, anger, fear, passive aggression, sense of moral entitlement, depression and sadness, hopelessness. At its worst it can lead to clinical depression or to the ingrained groove in the psyche that is hatred. I think both can lead to even more serious psychological disturbance.

There is a definite place for drawing boundaries, and saying no to destructiveness, and for telling your truth like it is, and for not allowing victimization or oppression. Forgiveness isn’t about saying it was ok, or it ever would be ok, if it wasn’t.

Sometimes people need to get angry. Sometimes it is healthy to get angry to move out of an even worse place. But that is very temporary. Ultimately people need to get free, and the quicker the better.

I now have come to really appreciate forgiveness as a practice. Not as a special case action, but as an ongoing practice. The malaise of negative emotion is so prevalent among human beings, that to not forgive is to never truly be emotionally free. I am not a forgiving person by nature, and I do not believe in cosmetic forgiveness, but forgiveness as a universal practice is powerful medicine.

When the ultimate destination of anger, in every case, is the practice of forgiveness, it changes the root emotional reaction. Our practice of the transformation of negative emotion starts to travel across space and time, to the deepest parts of our own lives. We heal the past, and we find our present starts to heal also. We start to heal the present moment, and we start to heal everything.

We can forgive, and we can remember who we really are.

"Expressions of the Emotions - Plate VI" - image in public domain

Elvis is leaving the building

We are presently at a slight interlude in the Journey of Neptune. He’s back in Aquarius, having put a toe into Pisces earlier in the year. He’ll be back in the sign of Pisces for the 13 year long haul in February 2012.

There’s a lot to Neptune’s travels through any sign, and each time it’s going to be a synergy of interlocking influences astrologically, but as you look back you get some sense of what Neptune actually does. He colours our collective dreams, passions and visions. He also turns things “mass” in a certain way. Mass-consciousness, mass-trends, mass-infatuations, mass-ideals, mass-delusions. Neptune moves things through powerful ebbs and flows of deep sentiment, attraction or aversion, a fluid magnetism that changes the landscape of how we thought things were at the time.

I was born with Neptune in Scorpio, and it was there until I was 11 years old. Throughout my entire infancy and childhood really (I count my childhood as having ended the Summer before), Neptune’s vibration transmitted through the station of the scorpion and the phoenix. It actually went into Scorpio at the end of 1955. 1955 – 1970, with typical dips in and out before going in properly in ’57. These were really times of the rebirth of a post war, post A bomb consciousness, of counterculture, and something that lay beneath the sex, drugs and rock n roll label. People dove down to find hidden light, and eliminated constraints (or believed they did) in pursuance of that illumination. Others responded differently to this tide, whether with fear, bewilderment, denial or detachment, but the landscape changed nonetheless. By 1971 the station had changed to expansive, wide ranging but potentially fanatical Sagittarius. 1971 – 1984 is the purest Neptune in Sagittarius period. This period sees the hey day of urban guerillas and zealous “terrorism”, the popularisation of political Islamic ideology, and I suspect the foundation work of the ascending religious right. It also saw a lot of deepening of spiritual search idealistically, and the proliferation of alternative belief systems both in religion and health. International travel had become something that many, many people undertook, even if it was only to Benidorm.

By 1984 Neptune had entered Capricorn, where it would be till 1998. The collective dream seemed to become very material during this time. Wealth and meritocracy, matt black, yuppies, quick profit, fools gold. When Neptune met Uranus in this sign the Berlin Wall fell. The Cold War unravelled. Kids started wearing designer labels as identity and status markers. The collective psyche seemed to have been corporatised at some level, like never before. Mass passions became acquisitive.

And so, in 1998 Neptune entered Aquarius. Our dreams turned to connection. The internet, which had been about for some time, now really started to seep into everyone’s lives. Technology created a kind of virtual astral plane, and it was mind blowing and life changing for those to whom it was new. Our whole sense of community and interrelationship shifted and became both expanded and selectable. Information became the King’s new wardrobe.

Now Neptune is about to leave Aquarius (for the next 165 years or so). It’s easy as an amateur astro-freak to either be wistful or just think “thank god”, depending on your personal bias towards a sign or a time. But as the tide ebbs and leaves us with the beached wrecks that we thought were eternally sea going vessels, it’s an interesting time to look at our ideals and dreams and what they mean to us, and what dreams themselves may be for.

I think we are about to realise what the internet could never do for us, as well as appreciate how much it did do, most especially for those people in need of connection just to find themselves, eg dispersed minorities. Dreams can be precursors of real change, and real work, actual fulfilment of real needs. And are not most dreams of worth if they inspire, and even prove useful and sustaining? They make us reach for what we suddenly see could be possible. Furthermore, are dreams not capable of realization within limits that exact a realistic price? We can be surprised at both how much is realistic, and what turns out to be real at all.

Neptune is now to take its latest residence in Pisces, and this might be both sobering and inspiring. I suspect the synthetic astral plane we have created with technology will now prove too material for our deeper needs, and too transient for the demands of durability and physicality. Neptune in Pisces offers something a lot older and more perennial, but not amenable to the same uses. Different time, different job.

What opportunities and what follies could this offer? Up to us I guess. Easy gold is always fools gold, though the taste of the dream is of course something in itself. Neptune can bring glamour, and glamour is a bitter trail to wisdom. But Neptune can also bring illumination, with our conscious work, and rewards that come to all.

Surfs up.

"Broken iPhone" by Zain Sohail on Deviant Art

a dream of herds, freaks, and peace

At the Full Moon which is just subsiding, I had a dream. Early in the morning about 6am, after a night of disturbed sleep. Phil had sprinkled jasmine oil around the bed, and that may have had something to do with it being such a dream laden night in conjunction with the Moon’s fullness.

The dream was like a story being told within the dream, which became the dream itself. There were a lot of animals, most similar to horses and cattle, in an area that was part natural and part built, like a market square on uneven earthen ground, with some wooden posts and railings, and a lot of these animals. Then in came just a few of these mutant-like horses, golden brown with many legs, but lopsided, like most of the legs on one side. I think I only noticed one at first, but in any case the freaky horses were chased by the others and attacked by them.

Then it became apparent that there were two freak horses running side by side, and they were male and female, not coupled as yet but there they were running side by side from the other horses, thrown together by chance. This was an amazing occurrence, that these rare, despised horses had found each other, their compliment, their mate. They ran, and when they got to a clear space they mated.

At their mating before all the other horses, the animals surrounding them got down on their knees and lay down facing them, as if in respect and a kind of reverence. It felt like a religious scene, and was very moving, and I cried in the dream, and then I woke up.

Something about the end of the dream was almost reminiscent of a Christian nativity scene, except that the animals were peacefully “bowing” before a mating couple, rather than the “holy mother and child”.

This dream really spoke to me very personally. The freak animal attacked by the herd, for it’s difference of nature or form, I think that would strike a chord with a lot of people from the LGBT community. That these freak animals found their mates against all odds, again struck a real chord with me as a gay man. Not sex, not just finding “some place” in the world, but your true mate. There’s no doubt that our relative aloneness predicates a lot of both our early self experience and our treatment. In the dream, it was the sudden appearance of the mate that was the turning point of the dream, that changed the entire meaning of their freakdom. Even before it was apparent that they were actual mates, the meaning had changed, though the chasing and attacking didn’t stop till they’d found their own space, however temporary, and consummated their union.

I realized as well from this dream that at a level of my psyche “male” and “female” symbolised the animals’ “other halves”, and that this was actually beyond gender, for there was no doubt for me that the dream was about gayness (in my case) or queerness more broadly, yet the “male” and “female” symbols held. I felt that was personally informative for me in terms of questions about “Queercraft“, and at least contributes to the answering of some questions that are simply not amenable to merely rational or political enquiry.

The other animals’ reverence and peace in the face of the consummation of the freak animals’ natures and love was like a deep, perennial hope, that the spiritual recognition of love and nature would indeed annul the herd instinct to turn on “freaks” and persecute difference of nature and form.

"wild albino donkeys" By Dirk Hartung - used under creative commons 2.0 license

how long has this been going on?

Forever. Surely forever. Centuries, millennia, forever. Finding, losing, rediscovering, the technology of love.

Not as in the “baby, baby I love you” song. Love as in who you really are, what everything really is, the whole, whole, whole already done deal.

Technology not as in “build me a wheel, a printing press, a bazooka, a synthetic astral plane”. Inner technology to understand and free our remembering self. How all this is only the way of one thing.

Been going on forever, and it always only just happened too.

I think this is really the mysteries. Doesn’t matter if they are termed Pagan or Christian or Buddhist or Sufic, ancient or modern. I can’t think of anything more fundamental, or welcome, or astonishingly liberating, than the unsuspected truth.

This is a radical simplicity disguised by the nakedness of its subtlety, and its closeness to us beyond intimacy.

"Medieval Gate in Tayac" by Semhur - used under creative commons license

the same, and different, just like everyone

At an LGBT Pagan meet up recently we had a discussion about male gayness, and just how “just like everybody else” we actually were. Some felt that really we weren’t, that we were different, and that the difference went way beyond who we were attracted to etc. In short that it was important for us to represent our difference and not model ourselves on heterosexual forms and expectations, but find our authentic way beyond that. Some felt that the drift of gay rights issues had crept towards an assimilation that didn’t serve us well.

Though I can relate to some parts of this, essentially I disagree with this view, and I’d like to explain why.

There is something which I learned of years ago under the term of “coming out within”, whereby we come to terms with our particular characteristics as who and what we are, and what will actually work for us, and what won’t work, because it is modelled on quite specifically different kinds of person. The “closet inside” can relate to a lot of things, but in part it relates to internalized images, identities, expectations and aspirations. Coming out of it is an ongoing process of growth. I spent many years looking at, and trying to follow certain spiritual paths in my own way, and one part of “coming out within” for me was giving up paths that could not explicitly and upfront just accept me as a gay man with a full life.

One of my main concerns re gay liberation and gay rights is what will serve the needs and bring about the well being of me and my loved ones. It has to be, because it’s personal. If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that an under-represented minority cannot simply take on the roles and definitions apportioned it by the majority. To do so is to live a distorted life from outside your own experience and sense of being, and even enshrine that position and so further distort your life.

But have the roles and definitions traditionally apportioned to us by society at large encouraged “assimilation”, or treated us as “just the same”? Not at all. The roles and definitions historically apportioned to us encourage exclusion, ghettoization, and use, as a kind of specialist service industry with no real concern for our wholeness or well being. Entertainer, dresser of hair, comedian, female impersonator, manager of decor, prostitute, confidant to straight women, etc. Then there’s the shadow side: punch bag to insecure young men, vilified and suspect sexual outsider, the rape that doesn’t count, the victim of campaigns of violent elimination. Traditionally, no one was trying to assimilate us, aside from the unusually enlightened and compassionate.

Are we different? Yes, of course we are. But do we think that “straight” people aren’t, from each other, or from the “norm”? We don’t have a monopoly on difference, but as a group we probably are more divergent from the norm than the average heterosexual in specific ways. We have also developed some of our own (frankly oppressive) “norms” over time, which I certainly do not feel a part of. But none of this difference abrogates our essential, common humanity and human needs. And it is just that common humanity which we have traditionally been excluded from, and which now shows signs of yielding to inclusion and recognition.

The entire area of “what’s our nature” and “what role are we offered” on the basis of alien judgement is a really quite complex one. We can ourselves take on those judgements, even if they are not rooted in our own experience, with some quite maladapted consequences. Because gay men love other men in ways which include the erotic and sexual, they are taken to be cryptically transgendered even where they are not. Sometimes we are referred to as a “third sex”, or as being in-between men and women in our natures, when in fact we are simply men. You can point to our characteristics which can meld what are traditionally “masculine” and “feminine” traits in different ways and different ratios, but this simply brings up questions about what can truly be called masculine or feminine, and just how much it has to do with physical sex or with gender. And again, to pretend that heterosexual people do not mix such characteristics seems to me to be colluding with an ideology of psychic segregation which, despite its historical power, really doesn’t match the nature of everyday experience. Gay people are apportioned transgenderism and deviance from that ideology of psychic segregation, and in part we hold it for the straight majority. I think it’s time to give it back, not absolutely but in equable measure, for the good of us all, because it’s the ideology that needs dissolving, and carrying either end of it is not healthy. I’m proud that transgendered, gay, lesbian and bisexual people share a struggle here, but the threads need to be untangled in order to bring about profounder change, not just for sub-groups, but for human beings at large.

Because we are often marginalized by society, shifted away from the centre, and represented as “others” so often, we get landed with descriptive terms like “transgressive” and “liminal” – but just how “transgressive” or “liminal” is being yourself and living your life happily? Transgression is a judgement of an action, it is not a place where anyone makes a home. And home is just what most people need, a place to grow and flourish, to be with loved ones, to raise family if they choose to, to be at peace, to rest, play, work and create, to feel loved and secure in our interrelationships.

It is exactly the realization of “we are not other” that makes possible the maturation of an authentic vision of self. And while rebellion is necessary at times, it’s no home either – it inevitably encodes a piece of alienation within its form. So we may start off asserting “yes, I am the other” to awaken our sense of being and self worth (ask any adolescent!), but ultimately we have to realize a selfhood of our own, which simply comes naturally to us, with our own nature as central as any one else’s. It is in this sense that we are “just the same as everyone else”, and it’s quite true. Realizing the presence and validity of gay existence from birth, through all stages of life, to old age and death is a corollary of this, and the denial of this (especially I feel the existence and needs of LGBT children) is simply a systematic form of abuse and elimination.

The majority can’t hog human inclusion, and we can’t hog difference. We would be so strong and powerful if it was just all “us”, infinitely diverse. That would be a true social psychedelic. That would be a real trip.

"Leaf diversity" by Gauravm1312 - in public domain