www.gaypsychepolitics.blogspot.

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Response to Karen Ocamb — Part II

by Wendell Jones

Los Angeles gay-media journalist Karen Ocamb posted a substantial statement on her
blog in February 2009 called Who's History? My Curious Encounter with the Radical
Faeries (see the link in this blog’s March 2009 Archive), in which she questioned my call
to protest a public presentation by notable L.A. gay community figures Don Kilhefner
and Mark Thompson about the Radical Faerie movement at the One National Gay and
Lesbian Archives that took place on February 15, 2009. In Part I of my response to her
post, written last year, I wrote about important historical information that I wished I
could have included in my original call to protest but which was neglected due to the
short time span I had to prepare the initial statement. In this second part, I would like to
rectify and clarify at least some of the numerous historical inaccuracies present
throughout Karen’s quite vicious commentary, as well as offer reasoned criticisms of the
main points she attempts to make.

Psychological Responsibility and the Shadow

Before addressing specific areas of her statement, I would like to discuss the overall
attitude she presents, exemplified by the sarcastic and hostile way that she references
the Jungian concept of the psychological shadow, especially when she says, talking
about Mitch Walker, one of the co-founders of the Radical Faeries, “And what gives
him—and his followers—the right to tell me about my goddamn ‘shadow’ when I have
not asked for his ‘help,’ thank you very much.” First of all, Mitch, as far as I know, has
never told Karen anything about her shadow, since they don’t even know each other
personally in the slightest, as Karen admits earlier in her rant. What he has done, in his
writings, public appearances and individual interactions during the twenty years I have
known him, has been to consistently articulate the key importance for all of us to
honestly and authentically deal with our shadows, an overall ethical position around
psychological responsibility that I discussed at the beginning of Part I.

Right now, I’d like to offer a more specific understanding of the shadow as that part of
each person’s unconscious mind which is comprised of the most shameful and socially
unacceptable feelings, fantasies and urges, including animal aggression, murderous
rage, rapist impulses, all the raw primal emotions as well as traumatic anguishes of early
childhood which, due to our emotionally-dysfunctional culture, never get healthfully
integrated into the adult personality. As Mitch has explained in his recent book, Gay
Liberation at a Psychological Crossroads (2009), the shadow is probably the most
serious problem facing gay people and all of humanity today, because when it is not
consciously confronted and wrestled with, it has a tendency to make us unintentionally
act out or defensively behave destructively in passive-aggressive and/or overtly violent
ways in the world with usually awful results now accumulating to a possibly ghastly
climax.
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It could well be quite reasonably argued that humanity’s persistent overall inability to
deal with the psychological shadow is why there is today horrific damage being inflicted
on the planetary environment, why people murder each other on a vast scale, why they
treat themselves and their closest so cruelly through domestic violence, unsafe sex,
alcoholism, etc. The point I wish to emphasize is that we all have a shadow, and it is
imperative for the future of the gay community and everyone that each of us learn to
deal with it better. But at the same time, this turns out to be an incredibly difficult task,
because the shadow by definition is comprised of those aspects of ourselves that we least
want to see, leading to remarkable degrees of defensiveness, evasion, projection and so
on. Karen enacts a classically defensive attitude towards the problem of the shadow
when she claims to have been violated by Mitch’s fantasied interest in her shadow. This
is clearly her own idea since she’s never even related with him, and as far as I am aware,
Mitch has never discussed Karen or her particular shadow in any manner that could
have “gotten back to her” in realistic justification of her claim of outrage. As I proceed in
this discussion, I will highlight other areas where it seems to me that Karen
fundamentally fails to grasp the basic meaning of the shadow idea, and of subjectivity as
psychological experience more generally, and instead unselfreflectively acts out
problems of her own personal psychology.

Another simple example of such comprehensional failure is suggested by the start of her
statement, where she says, “I don’t do gossip,” and then proceeds to unload massive
amounts of what I can only think is best described as indeed “gossip,” or intimate
matters about others she knows or has heard about, as she goes into describing her
highly subjective memory of quite dishy personal interactions between her and my
longtime associate Doug Sadownick that took place 15 years ago, detailed below, as well
as describing hearsay from other equally-loaded community events that she herself did
not attend, also discussed below. Furthermore, she makes various bald claims
throughout her piece that are not at all supported by any reasonable evidence or logic.
For example, she writes that in his journalistic days, Doug was “skewing or creating
details to enhance a story which were not facts I witnessed or quotes I heard when
covering the exact same event,” but she does not offer a single specific example of the
purported misbehavior to support such a serious and otherwise possibly-defamatory
critique of Doug’s professionalism. The piquant irony in this instance, as I hope to show
more so below, is that this “skewing or creating details” is exactly what Karen herself
does in her own blog statement, thereby again suggesting the reasonable conclusion that
it is she who is massively projecting or defensively imputing her own “skewing” shadow
to Doug and the other victims of her defamatory attack.

Caring for Michael Callen in a More Gay Way

Karen reports that she had facilitated a “miraculous reconciliation” between Michael
Callen, a prominent AIDS activist during the late 80s and early 90s, and his biological
family in the hours just before he died, and that Doug, who was also taking care of him
but wasn’t there at the time, then viciously screamed at her when she later told him
about it, unfairly accusing her of violating Michael's very being, such that she felt deeply
wronged and resentfully hurt. She makes it seem in her account as if Doug didn’t want
Michael to have anything to do with Michael’s family, as if Doug was some kind of
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Machiavellian or even crazy person cruelly trying to selfishly dominate his friend’s dying
experience in order to keep him exploitationally apart from his caring kinfolk.

Since Doug and I have been good friends for many years, I asked him about Karen’s
account. Doug explained that during the last two years before Michael’s death, he was
the central person managing Michael’s end-of-life situation and its important
particulars. Karen’s version differs significantly, for example when she says that all
interaction with Michael’s family was turned over to her to manage “since I could speak
heterosexual” while Doug was disengaged or even hostile about it. She even claims
credit for coordinating a big family visit a month before Michael died, but Doug has
assured me that he was actually the organizer and expeditor of this final in-person
meeting, and that he had bent over backwards to make Michael’s parents and brother
comfortable, even taking them out to dinner after seeing the bed-ridden Michael. In
fact, Doug recently showed me letters he still has from both Michael’s mother and
brother effusively expressing their gratitude to Doug for his kindness toward them. As I
understand it, after the visit Michael thanked Doug for handling it but specifically told
him that he did not need to deal with his family again, especially because he wanted to
die in a gay way in a more so gay space while his family, on top of being a typically-
breederistic organization ideologically as well as in fact, was made up of virulently anti-
gay conservative Christians not fundamentally swayed either by Michael’s prior gay
community fame, musical art and national PWA work or the recent hospital visit, and
this in particular regard to Michael’s father, where there was still substantial unresolved
homophobia of a most-vigorously ugly and well-supported sort. It is estimably realistic
to see that Michael may very well have recognized that as he got closer to the end he
would be at his weakest, highly medicated, and perhaps unable to emotionally protect
himself from his reactionary family’s intensely selfish agendas. As it did in fact turn out,
Karen’s so-called familial “miraculous reconciliation” was a telephone conversation
which she orchestrated at the very end when Michael was indeed at his most vulnerable,
and which did expressly oppose his dying wishes, at least as Doug understood them after
many long months of highly intimate relating with Michael around these very issues.
Thus, it seems quite reasonable that after Michael died, Doug would have vigorously
confronted Karen about what she had done, about how she herself may have actually
been exploiting Michael cruelly to act out her own problematic feelings around being
somehow abandoned by her own parents. Karen admits that Doug’s challenge carried
enough weight that she was forced to consider this possibility and asked the question:
“did I facilitate the reconciliation between Michael and his family because of my own
family issues?”

This is a good start, and exactly the right way to begin exploring possible shadow
business. But then Karen next writes, “The answer was no. Michael was my friend and
this was always about him.” Although it may in fact be true that Karen made very real
sacrifices to help Michael to the best of her ability, this two-bit line of ill-reasoning
shows off her woeful lack of psychological self-awareness. Any person with the least
understanding of the concept of the shadow, by no means an arcane formulation, would
recognize that any pat “no” to this open-ended type of subjective question reveals a
foundational ignorance about it at best, and likely a violent defensiveness behind that!
How could Karen’s family issues not be subjectively implicated emotively in such a
profoundly evocative moment as the end of a person’s life she is involvingly caught up in
caring for? Is she some sort of saint or blessed angel as pure as driven snow? How could
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any of us, after exhausting days of terminal care for a sensitive and intelligent young
friend dying an excruciating and unfair death from the ugly complications of ravaging
AIDS, not be vulnerably provoked into associated personal psychological business
undoubtedly related (because it always is) to early developmental issues, particularly in
terms of charged childhood stuff when still-homophobic but needy and fiercely
manipulative parents are now suddenly calling with last-minute maneuvers? While
Karen is easily accusing Doug of being cruel in the name of being helpful, she doesn’t
appear to at all appreciate that she may very well be ironically describing her own
otherwise hidden, unconscious shadow machinations. What if Doug is right, which is
quite equitable to consider due to his many long months of intimate involvement in the
situation when contrasted to Karen’s much more limited participation? What if Michael
really didn’t want to have to deal with his parents again, particularly as he weakly lay at
the end stage of his long expiration?

This difficult situation around Michael’s final experiences may in fact be a “textbook”
illustration as to how serious the challenging problem of psychological projection of
personal shadow material is, a two-faced situation in which Karen would be, through an
internal defensive maneuver, deflecting responsibility for her own violent predations
toward Michael by instead feeling as if that violence was coming from Doug to her, and
then subsequently demonizing him in a scapegoating reaction so strongly that she held a
bitter grudge about it deeply for many years without ever even attempting to address it
with him as she was outwardly ongoingly friendly. Karen writes that she was “estranged”
from Doug after Michael’s death, but according to Doug, they actually had many
interactions over the years since, in which Karen never alluded in the slightest to any of
these crucial matters. Still, Doug became more aware through time that there was a
problem in his relationship to Karen, and I know that he wanted to try to resolve it with
her because he asked me about doing so more than once, though I don’t think he ever
attempted very hard to really try anything. Doug has an anxious shadow, too, of course,
which perhaps got in the way of his more directly raising his concerns with Karen during
their years of interaction after Michael’s death. He told me that he felt intimidated by
her seemingly convivial yet covertly limitational handling of him. It’s also reasonable to
suspect that he did not trust that Karen was in any realistic way working on her own
psychological issues so as to be able to take better responsibility for them while matters
about Michael and Doug were addressed with her, so it’s understandable that he would
feel intimidated by trying to approach her about it.

But what about Karen’s statement that Doug “screamed” at her? He has told me that he
doesn’t remember actually screaming, but acknowledges that he strongly disputed her
actions when she told him what had happened with the Michael familial
“reconciliation.” Was it necessary for him to do that right after Michael’s death? I’d like
to answer this question by discussing the critical, if somewhat unpopular, importance of
gay-centeredness as an attitude, value and perspective, which I believe Doug was
speaking for in that angry moment with Karen, a value which evidently was highly
important to Michael Callen as well.

“Reconciling” with Our Families, or Not

I think it is crucial to explore here some of the extraordinarily complex issues involved
in how gay people relate to their heterosexual parents and the whole institution of the
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biological family. Karen talks in terms of “reconciling” gay and lesbian folk to our
families, but what does such rapprochement actually entail, especially if we consider the
question from a gay-centered stance? Let’s take, for example, the tragic problem of a gay
person fated to die too young, as I saw many times in my early work in ACT-UP, for the
most part with unresolved conflicts involving family members, often hidden or
unconscious. And while the experience of sharing one’s dying process with the family
can possibly offer a last chance for honest communication and perhaps even
reparations, apologies or love of a healing nature, if instead family members harbor
homophobic attitudes and feelings, even if unacknowledged, the dying gay person will
experience a terrible re-traumatization from them when he or she is at a most
vulnerable place.

I know from my own history how many variations on this unfair dynamic of bigotry
between suffering gay persons and their kin there can be. When my good friend Wade
was at the end of his ferocious struggle with AIDS, his long-absent father suddenly
arrived and began verbally spewing hatred in Wade’s hospital room about how
disgusted he was to see me and other gay men holding his son’s hand and caring for the
one he claimed to love so much. Wade’s brother, a heterosexual man, was there and
immediately stepped in to confront their father, fortunately, telling him that this was not
a loving way to act and if he did not stop he would be asked to leave. It may be
impossible for any gay person to resolve all of a lifetime’s homophobically-inflicted
familial trauma when at death’s door, but it is possible to create a reasonably respectful
dialogue that can allow for powerfully fresh expressions of renewal, love and support.
However, this is an impossible task if a gay person’s family members, like Wade’s, claim
to love their child but continue to act out or tolerate rejecting condemnation of their
child’s gay essence. As Doug and others have told me, Michael’s right-wing parents had
a long and unrepentant history of being cruelly homophobic to him and to gays
generally, so I could easily understand why Michael did not want them involved at the
end, and why Doug could have yelled at Karen after he discovered what she had done.
Also, it is not so peculiar, in my experience, for people who share feelings of unusual
closeness and intimacy when taking care of dying friends to feel abandoned or alone
after the death finally occurs, or to become angry over conflicts that develop in the end.
Doug has told me he regrets that any disagreements from that time were not fully
discussed. Karen obviously felt quite hurt and angry with Doug, but I think she was
wrong to assume he acted primarily out of his own selfish and violent personal agendas,
and doubly wrong to behave dishonestly with him for all those years after Michael’s
death on such a mistakenly-assumptive basis. It seems much more likely that in her big
reaction, Karen was projecting her own bad-faith act of domination onto Doug to get
retribution heaped on him rather than, more justifiably, on herself, and that she
assumed, conveniently and incorrectly, that if she ever discussed her feelings with Doug
he would not only take no adequate responsibility for his own shadow issues but instead
would only attack her more viciously.

The End of My Friendship with Mark Thompson

Karen’s initial problems with Doug were only compounded when Mark Thompson
apparently much later told her about an incident in 1997 in which Doug, myself and
other prior friends of Mark’s confronted Mark at a bookstore reading he gave for his
newly published volume, Gay Body. She writes that “the small group also showed up at
 6

Skylight Books in Silver Lake during Mark's reading and shouted ‘shadow’ questions
that left Mark so frightened, he and Malcolm were hastily snuck out the back by Betty
Berzon and Terry DeCrescenzo.”

In order to accurately comprehend this bookstore incident, it is critical to first

appreciate that Doug and I had both been long-term close friends with Mark. We had all
done serious gay-centered inner work together for many years and had been meeting
monthly in a very intimate, psychologically oriented Radical Faerie circle. Doug and
myself, as well as Mitch Walker, had even been personally thanked at the beginning of
Mark’s new book for our help and support in its preparation, and we respected him as
an important community leader. All of us had been emotionally close as well as tightly
allied in gay organizing and in our commitment to gay-centered inner work as a
personal practice and a political act of the highest order.

Karen never discusses why Mark was asked several challenging questions about his
shadow at his reading. Instead, she insinuates that we were simply harassing him. To
offer a different view, let me explain that I was directly involved in the events which led
up to the bookstore confrontation, and which I would now like to recount. A crisis had
occurred in my friendship with Mark a few months before the Skylight incident, wherein
the possibility had arisen that Mark had presided over and engaged in dangerous
incidents of unsafe sex at encounter workshops he ran that could have resulted in the
spread of HIV, and he was refusing to meaningfully consider that possibility. I attended
some of these workshops and had met for nearly two years with Mark in a Radical Faerie
Circle that was organized after the previous local Circle split up (as I described in Part I),
and I trusted Mark enough at that time to have invited friends to also participate in his
workshops.

I first became aware of a possible problem when a mutual friend of mine and Mark’s,
who had initially invited Mark to present local public encounter workshops, told me he
was concerned he might have been infected by Mark with HIV at one of these events
that we both had participated in. He pointed out how he believed his infection was as
much his fault as that of anyone who infected him because we are all responsible for safe
sex, and we can’t simply blame others for our own failures, but he was nevertheless
distraught and agonizing over when exactly he had seroconverted. He was afraid Mark
would end their friendship if he broached such a difficult issue with him.

I insisted that his fear of such retaliation by Mark was not realistic, for Mark was our
trusted associate and was quite committed to examining any of his own unconscious
motivations that might possibly have led to hurting others. I had my friend carefully go
over his sexual history and list out the exact dates of his HIV tests, which he had been
doing regularly for some time. It turned out that he had heretofore consistently tested
negative and had had no questionable sexual encounters he could recall more recently
with anyone except Mark. Since this problem related to public workshops we both had
attended and could impact further such events, I insisted my friend had an obligation to
discuss with Mark the possibility that Mark had infected him. I again assured him that
Mark was an ethical leader who could ultimately be trusted to support him in talking
about this uncomfortable matter and would in fact want to know this information.
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I was wrong. Although Mark agreed to an initial discussion, when my friend was not
satisfied and wanted to process his concerns more fully with him, Mark abruptly cut off
any and all further communication about the matter. I was shocked. I then talked to
Mark directly, begging him to consider that this coldly-rejecting behavior was likely not
the best way to handle the problem. Mark refused to get into the issue anymore, other
than to derisively dismiss the infected person, our long-time mutual friend and co-
sponsor of his workshops, as a “borderline personality” whom I should just ignore. After
that encounter with me, he then also proceeded to sever contact with the entire group of
psychological Radical Faeries he had been meeting with for years, particularly his close
activist friends who were trying by that point to reason with him to just slow down and
better consider the aroused psychology behind what he was doing. Still, I clung to my
belief that Mark was a good friend who would ultimately work through these difficulties
with those of us comrades who truly cared about him, so I wrote him and called, trying
to forestall his evident ending of what I’d been led to feel was a very special friendship,
but to no avail.

If I was not concerned that Mark as a public figure might continue to give workshops
that could be potentially unsafe, I would still have felt deeply pained by his rejecting
behavior, to be sure, but this matter of Mark’s betrayal would have seemed not so much
of an important community issue to me. Yet he did persist in presenting himself openly
as an expert S.M. teacher in various settings such as the Radical Faerie off-shoot Black
Leather Wings and in smaller groups, and he could now use his most recent book Gay
Body, with my minor implicit imprimatur by virtue of his grateful acknowledgement of
me by name (along with a few others) at the book’s start, as further proof of his fitness
to be such a leader. I was seriously concerned because of my historical involvement that
due to the power now being invested in Mark, if he did not critically evaluate his
supposed ethical standards, subsequent questionable actions could potentially
jeopardize the safety of many others, as well as himself, such that it would culpably
entail me even in a modest fashion if I did not speak and/or behave in some contrary
manner. My point in attempting to meet my own standard of integrity about this
challenging situation back then was and indeed still is that if Mark could not more fully
discuss important hurt feelings and related concerns involving his encounter group
events and a sincerely thoughtful participant, and if he refused to recognize a moral duty
to forthcomingly address possible mistakes he may have made in relation thereto, then
he could easily wind up repeating feasibly irresponsible actions. Worst of all for myself,
as someone who had participated in and helped promote Mark’s work and reputation, as
I just mentioned, I did indeed feel a strong degree of ethical culpability in this
problematic matter that would be compounded if I did not try to more directly challenge
Mark about what seemed like his strikingly hypocritical position.

When I subsequently confronted Mark at Skylight Books with other friends, it was
because Mark had now completely isolated himself from his quickly-former associates,
and that was the only place we could see him. At the book reading, I purposely did not
bring up the matter of unsafe sex because, at the time, I imagined Mark could become so
publicly exposed thereby that he would feel too trapped in his toxic shame to
functionally communicate with his former friends. Also, I was concerned about the
privacy of the other friend he could have infected. I still vainly hoped that if what
seemed like terribly unconscious behavior was pointed out in a sensitively crafted “right
way,” Mark could better work with his own traumatic feelings to then act more ethically.
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What ensued at the bookstore didn’t take much to bring about, because many people
there, including the few I came with, as well as what turned out to be various of Mark’s
associates and allies, were full of explosive feelings. As Mark was reading, ex-friend
Chris Kilbourne asked him about the shadow a couple times. After all, the subtitle of his
book, “Journey through Shadow to Self,” begged for such a query, when Mark, in his
presentation, was assiduously avoiding anything that smacked of his own darkness,
having chosen to read some of the most innocuously ingratiating passages in the book.
Mark did not respond. Then, a spirited argument arose, with Mark’s partner, Malcolm
Boyd, yelling at us first to shut up as more of Mark’s former friends broached questions
about the shadow, while Terry DeCrescenzo and Betty Berzon were initially hostile, but
then began asking what we meant by what we were trying to say, with several of us
attempting to answer them. Although there were clearly large amounts of hostility and
infantile hurt-rage erupting in the room, the confrontation remained fairly civilized
albeit boisterous, and Mark was never prevented from speaking up or continuing his
presentation, but he certainly did his best to appear victimized, as if his delicate person
was way too tender and fragile to hold up under the supposedly-terrible assault there
being inflicted.

Karen writes in her blog that Mark, and also Harry Hay, had even gone so far as to
suggest to her about difficult people such as I was becoming, that if she was ever to
publicly write about this issue, the group of us who had confronted Mark at Skylight
Books would then violently “come after me” and even worse, they said, “They'll come
after your dogs.” It seems uncharacteristic for Harry to utter such a blatant scurrility,
but even if he did, I can say with confidence, personally knowing all of the accused, that
there isn’t a single individual who would in some way even imagine it, much less want to
hurt or kidnap anyone’s dog. Does Karen seriously believe that any of us are likely to
advocate or act out that stupid level of crude physical violence? Even if this was only
meant rhetorically, it would still constitute a powerful shadow projection nonetheless,
since those here being ridiculed (and/or exposed) are ones who typically cup spiders in
the house and set them free outside, not vile torturers of innocent pets, nor any other
sort of diseased revenge seeker.

I should also mention that, although Mark evidently claimed to Karen he was so
frightened at the book reading that he had to be hastily snuck out the back door, I could
see how Mark’s seemingly terrified demeanor disappeared completely when he spoke to
me privately at the event just before he did leave. He smiled at me pleasantly and wished
me well and didn’t act afraid at all. As I saw with my own eyes, this stance then
dramatically changed at once when he then turned back to his allies whom he had asked
to protect him, whereupon he again appeared as a scared, harassed victim. Could it be
that Mark was actually worried about being exposed as a possibly failed S.M. master
presenting questionable workshops? If so, then it could be that he behaved
manipulatively in the bookshop situation and afterward when recounting it to others
over the years (and now to Karen) because he did not want anyone who didn’t already
know to find out a perhaps ruinously-humiliating truth.

If Karen had ever taken the time to ask Doug, myself or the several others who had
taken up what we felt was a moderately and principled confrontational position at
Mark’s public book reading, all of whom still live locally and can easily be reached, she
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would have heard a deeply different account than the one Mark (and allies) must have
described to her. It’s actually very odd that it never seems to have occurred to Karen that
there might even be a legitimate reason for anyone to confront Mark. Why would a
group of close friends who had worked together for many years suddenly begin
challenging one of their own colleagues in this unusual way for no reason, and why did
Karen never take the time to at all check out that basic question, if the matter was so
important that Karen feels she can use it in her blog commentary in the slashing manner
which she does? My guess is that she never even considered the possibility that such a
telling lack of curiosity could have been related to her never having resolved her own
shadowy hurt and rage feelings toward Doug. In her mind, it seems Doug had become a
violent, mean person who attacked others as part of a malicious cult for no just reason.
Thus, biasing shadow projections led her to abandon truthful journalistic objectivity and
instead skew the facts so as to invalidationally dismiss the demonstrators’ legitimacy at
the February 15 One Archives event, maliciously concluding that these are the same
lame people who were “jerks making nuisances of themselves at a book reading.”

The One Archives Protest

In her one-sided, inaccurate blog statement Karen argues that there was no valid reason
to protest Don and Mark’s One Archives event because in his Frontiers articles, “Don
mentions Mitch—so Mitch is not really erased from history.” She also writes: “And
surely someone into psychology knows that individuals may have differing
interpretations of the same event.” And then: “Don said he had no idea what all the
racket was about—he knew his truth and would respect that Mitch's follower had his
truth, too.” For Don to claim ignorance of the issues at hand is ridiculous, in my opinion.
How could he not know about these dynamics when he worked with Mitch as a Radical
Faerie organizer for a number of years and then left the Radical Faeries with Mitch to
form Treeroots specifically because of this type of personal problem? Here is not simply
a case of differing interpretations; my point in the essay that I presented at the protest
(see below) and the point of the challenging questioners after Don’s talk was not that
Don failed to mention Mitch, but that Don is actually consciously distorting facts that he
is fully aware of to create the false impression that Mitch had no real role in the
formation of the Radical Faeries, for important reasons I will shortly explore further.

Karen pointedly ignores the completely different story about the Faerie Movement’s
origins recounted by Stuart Timmons in his book The Trouble with Harry Hay (1990),
compiled after interviewing Harry, his partner John Burnside, Mitch and Don himself,
which book I quoted from in detail in my essay “Don Kilhefner’s Anti-Psychological
Rewriting of Faerie History” that was attached to the protest invitation email Karen is
commenting on in her blog (see “Wendell Jones’ Protest Statement” in the March 2009
archive of this blog). Stuart’s account has its own manipulative bias against Mitch, but at
least he was able to extensively acknowledge Mitch’s founding role in the movement.
For Don to now report in the Feb. 24, 2009 issue of Frontiers that the only involvement
Mitch had in starting the Radical Faeries concerned his grumpy attendance at two
meetings is ludicrous. Don worked intimately with Mitch ongoingly for nearly four years
in the Radical Faeries and they both actively attempted to raise issues of psychological
responsibility and shadow with Harry and the others during that time before Don left
with Mitch in 1981. Not long after, in 1982, Don and Mitch founded Treeroots, an
alternative educational organization, to address these new kinds of activist concerns
 10

more directly. There they worked together for more than twelve years longer promoting
the study and better realization of gay psychology, before Don then resigned, in my
opinion over unresolved personal issues similarly to what had happened with Harry,
ironically, in that Don it seems to me was now trying to act out his shadow psychology
resentfully on Mitch analogously to how Harry had previously been acting out against he
and Mitch, and in the manner Karen has been likewise nastily perpetrating on Doug.

A related point concerns Karen’s assertion that Mark’s interview with Mitch in his book
Gay Soul shows Mark’s own objective inclusion of Mitch in Faerie history, a claim which
is, to say the least, equally as disingenuous as that concerning Don’s eliminational
maneuvering. Like Don, Mark worked intimately with Mitch for many years in the
Faeries and then Treeroots, and it was during this later period of quite close
collaboration that Mark interviewed Mitch for Gay Soul as well as promoted Mitch’s
ideas in both Gay Spirit and Gay Body. It was only after Mark was later confronted with
his ethical responsibility as a presenter of gay S.M. workshops that he began criticizing
Mitch privately and now has joined forces with Don to erase Mitch’s gay movement
contributions from the historical record. The email invitations and ads for their One
Archives presentation made no mention of Mitch at all, even though he lives in town and
is at least as much of an “official” Radical Faerie co-founder as Don is, and certainly
much more so than Mark. Karen can just sit back and let such meanly-biased messages
go out under the illusory claim that, for example, Don is merely “presenting his truth,” a
seemingly innocuous attitude about tolerating diverse perspectives that masks the ugly
gay history recounted above, like reactionary Christian conservatives justificationally
saying they actually love homosexuals and are not really bigoted, it’s just their legitimate
and quite respectable religious view that gays will go to hell. As I said, Don was in actual
fact very deeply involved with Mitch for some years, as for example evidenced by his
having written Mitch dozens of substantial personal letters all through the time they
worked together before Mitch moved back to L.A. in 1982 to work even more closely
with Don in their new Treeroots project, missives which I have personally seen,
including letters in which Don bitterly complained about the cruel and unconscious
ways Harry treated him while they lived together in L.A. at a Faerie commune, a dark
history that Mark is well aware of since he himself pretty much left the Faeries to join
Don and Mitch after they started Treeroots. What the protest organizers criticized was
Mark’s current attempt, along with Don’s, to badly rewrite gay history because of
unresolved personal issues. More importantly, in altering the historical record for these
self-serving reasons, Don and Mark were betraying the effort to promote better
psychological authenticity and responsible consideration of destructive shadow behavior
which they had worked for many years to promote along with Mitch. So when Karen
states “these two gentle human beings are not the ones doing any sort of intimidation or
‘violence’,” she is again ignorantly revealing her psychological defenses against
accurately recognizing the reality of the violence-prone shadow in these individuals and
in her own collusive self. It is violent to consciously and persistently edit a former,
supposedly beloved colleague out of history and even more so to then completely ignore
this fact at a public forum on that history, or pretend it is not happening by evasively
claiming, as Don does, that he simply knows his own “truth,” or as Karen does, by
slavishly going along with Don’s duplicitous maneuver.

In other words, it appears to me that Don and Mark have serious shadow feelings of rage
and hurt that they are resentfully acting out irresponsibly over the issue of Faerie
 11

historical truth, and Karen, who has her own unresolved matters of betrayal involving
Doug, is using this opportunity of the One Archives protest to attack Doug and those
associated with him as justification for her dubious actions years ago with Michael
Callen and her subsequent rage when Doug forcefully confronted her on being
psychologically dominated by unresolved family issues. If there were no problematic
shadow dynamics involved for them in regard to the protestors’ complaints, Don and
Mark would have easily acknowledged their omission of Mitch and said it was a mistake,
once it was pointed out; they could have said that Mitch factually played a very
important role in Faerie history that they became warmly involved in partnering but
that now they have disagreements with him. And then they could have discussed those
disagreements. Instead, at their presentation Don continued to deny that Mitch had any
significant role in the foundation of the Faeries while he, Don, was just about the apple
of Harry’s eye, and Mark in turn weasily evaded the facts through a series of clever half
truths and sly evasions, with both relentlessly ignoring the seminal ethical importance of
psychological growth and debate to the further development of the gay community, a
far-reaching matter which those affiliated with the supposedly-visionary Radical Faeries
should be vigorously promoting (I have an audio recording of the entire event and a
portion of it on video as well).

Similarly, if Karen was not seriously dominated by her own shadow in this business, she
could have investigated the actual history involved, but instead she thoughtlessly
compounded the atrocious attempt to defame and obliterate Mitch as an important gay
figure by stating, “I'm a longtime LGBT reporter and in the 20 years I've been covering
people, places and things in Southern California—I have never once met Mitch Walker—
who they claim is such an ‘activist.’” It’s interesting to note that Karen here
implicationally makes herself into a “kingmaker” of LGBT activists, but even more
importantly, she is woefully clueless about both the details and the profound meaning of
Mitch’s lifelong activism. It’s certainly true that he has not been involved with the
legislative fights of the more obvious gay activists, and I believe this has been fully
intentional, because Mitch feels the real action has been elsewhere. Instead, when he
was still only in his mid-20’s, he became the first “out” gay person to be published in a
respected Jungian journal, then soon after went on to co-found the Radical Faeries with
Harry and Don, and then founded Treeroots with Don, which for more than two decades
presented literally hundreds of consciousness-raising gay community activities in
Southern California. More recently, he has co-founded the Institute for Contemporary
Uranian Psychoanalysis, the first homosexually-centered establishment of its kind, a
most serious and growing effort that since 2005 has offered more than 90
groundbreaking public educational events in West Hollywood. Of even greater
significance, Mitch has thoroughly devoted himself to articulating the deepest and
fullest possible vision of what it could mean to be psychologically more self-aware as a
valuable gay person, writing papers, pamphlets and books that have influenced a whole
generation of gay-centered psychotherapists here in Los Angeles and elsewhere, those
who in my opinion are very much in the real trenches of progressive gay activism today.
Mitch has pioneered a groundbreaking gay-centered contribution to Jungian theory by
describing a unique process of gay male psychological development through archetypes
such as the double and Uranian Eros. His writing has been referenced by many others in
the field. However, although press releases about Treeroots events and then those of the
Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis have been sent to Frontiers and IN
Los Angeles for years, as Karen says, she always ignored them and “passed them on to
 12

others” because she could not be objective about these things given her animosity
towards Doug. Thus, it appears to me that her unresolved resentment, overall lack of
objectivity, covert pro-family stance and virulently anti-psychological attitude have
conspiratorially led her to altogether ignore not only Mitch’s important historical
activist role promoting gay-centered psychological liberation, but also, more to the
point, the healthful appreciation needed by gay self and community for sufficiently
confronting entrenched internalized homophobic effects in the form of an endemic gay
shadow problem.

In her conclusion, Karen states that at the Archives presentation, when “someone asked
why there wasn't a Radical Faerie group in L.A. Don held out his hand and said,
‘Because of this.’ Meaning the angry divisiveness,” suggesting that people like the
demonstrators had destroyed the Radical Faeries just as we ruined Mark’s book reading.
This is simply not true. I would instead argue the opposite, that the failure to frankly
and fairly address angry and hurt feelings, an insistence on hiding “personal” differences
and leaving them to fester, is what fatally hindered better Radical Faerie organizing here
in town. I have gone into some detail in Part I discussing how this recurrent failure was
enabled during the planning for a 1994 Southern California Radical Faerie gathering,
and in this part I have shared my similarly-themed experiences of Mark and the Radical
Faerie brother he disowned who became HIV-positive, but I know of numerous other
examples illustrating this same problem. Many gay men would come to Faerie
gatherings, for example, and then feel alienated or excluded, subsequently never coming
back. I saw this over and over in the course of my long-time participation. Other Radical
Faeries, like myself, eventually left local Radical Faerie circles because of the persistent
failure to address the hurt feelings and unconscious destructive behavior that eventually
arise in all gay associations (as well as non-gay groups) when psychological issues are
defensively ignored while covertly acted out. Many of us Faerie dropouts continued to
organize and promote Gay Spirit development to greater or lesser success in subsequent
groups like Tumescence, the Gay Men’s Medicine Circle, the California Men’s Gathering,
Body Electric, Treeroots, and the Institute for Contemporary Uranian Psychoanalysis.
Star Circle, the group that organized the 1994 Faerie Gathering fiasco I related in Part I
of this statement, ended shortly thereafter as an overall community forum, but the
Faeries I had been meeting with prior to 1994 continued to organize retreats for years,
some of which Harry attended. No confrontations or angry divisiveness ever stopped
any of this organizing from going on. In fact, a Los Angeles Faerie named Matrix still
hosts small “faerie gatherettes” that are listed on the web.

One participant at Don and Mark’s presentation actually said that he suspected Radical
Faeries were still meeting in Los Angeles, just in different forms, a statement that Karen,
who was there, ignores. Karen promotes the audacious lie that Radical Faerie organizing
ended in Los Angeles because of “angry divisiveness” because she wants to imply that
any confrontation with how people unconsciously act out shadow issues in the gay
community is so upsetting and disruptive that it destroys constructive community
building.

She furthers this backwards argument in her blog commentary with the following
closing innuendo: “Many of the folks in the audience—especially the young people—
wanted to find out about their history and perhaps find out about why gay people are
different from heterosexuals. Instead they were treated to a confrontation by perennially
 13

petulant Peter Pans who seem to delight in tearing down others—in the name of
therapy.” She is saying that those who asked challenging questions disrupted the
presentation so thoroughly that no practicable discussion of gay history or concepts of
gay identity was accessibly possible. But in actuality, Don and Mark’s presentation was
not interrupted. Demonstrators passed out substantial written materials outside so that
those interested could find out more information about the history involved in a way
that would not block or disorganize Don and Mark’s presentation itself, and most
attendees seemed pleased to accept the materials. Protestors inside the hall who asked
why Don and Mark were distorting important history waited politely until Don and
Mark had finished their talk and opened the floor to questions before they spoke in turn
and, as far as I know, none of them raised their voices until their questions were
persistently only ignored or evaded and they were then told to quit asking because it was
time to move on to other questions. Even then, only a few brief angry comments were
uttered. In fact, the presenters then went on to fully answer all other questions offered
without any interruption. If the young people who attended were unable to “find out
about their history and perhaps find out about why gay people are different from
heterosexuals,” it was not the fault of the demonstrators, but points to a fundamental
inadequacy of Don and Mark’s presentation, which, in my view, amounted to a badly
emasculated and trivializing version of real Faerie history and future gay possibility.

Once again, I argue that Karen is defensively projecting her own shadow in her
complaint. She claims that the protestors are trying to stop people from learning about
their history, when it is actually Karen who is actively trying to thwart knowing our gay
past through her ad hominem innuendos that create a badly falsified impression of real
events. Karen is doing exactly what she accuses Doug of journalistically enacting at the
start of her blog attack on him, skewing depictions so that the result no longer
corresponds in key ways to the actual events that did truly happen.

Concluding Thoughts

Karen insinuates throughout her blog commentary, as well as directly claiming, that all
of the confrontations I participated in and have discussed were instigated by Mitch
Walker, whom she portrays as a maniacal and Machiavellian figure who fiercely
manipulates others to do his nasty bidding. But as I stated earlier, when I wrote my
original response to Don’s article that was attached to the call to protest, I wrote it
spontaneously without consulting anyone else because I felt deeply provoked morally by
the situation, and because I have been personally sincerely inspired by the great support
Mitch has given me over the years as a fellow gay being and activist, and even more so
because I sincerely believe that his boldly unrepentant stance, wherein Radical Faerie
and all gay activists must seriously confront the unconscious, shadowy ways homosexual
people and especially themselves individually can unwittingly viciously attack and harm
each other due to the vexing psychological problem of internalized homophobia through
both blatant and subtle forms of violent, destructive behavior like unsafe sex, personal
dishonesty, domination in group activities and attack journalism, is a perhaps daunting
but crucial message which if anything seems to me even more valid and needed today
than it was at the founding of the Radical Faerie movement more than 30 years ago.

Throughout her malicious defense of what are actually Mark’s and Don’s own various
violent maneuvers, using rumor-mongering smears against the organizers of the protest
 14

as well as many other irrational methods, Karen is thereby mal-appropriately

advocating that our persistent psychological aggression towards each other should
simply remain a secret matter not to be exposed before, during or after its poisonous
enactment, just as the unrelenting homophobic violence in our families of origin is
likewise kept hidden from a needed and thorough accounting. She dismissively states
that, in general, “therapy-related stories are more ‘lifestyle’ than news,” so she passes
over them as a journalist, which is the crux of my problem with her bigoted stance. The
so-called therapy-related stories she refuses to cover are, to me and many others, a
centrally newsworthy aspect of the Gay Liberation story and particularly in regard to its
better future, thus really the most significant kind of journalistic topic which a gay
newsmagazine could possibly cover.

The first Gay Liberation organization I joined in 1970 was part of a global coalition that
included women’s liberation, revolutionary people of color, environmental groups,
spiritual seekers, antiwar activists and others committed to creating a more sanely
humanistic world that could hopefully save our planet in a time of crisis. Gay Liberation
was seen then as an essential part of creating such a viable future, but today gay
magazines such as Frontiers in L.A. and The Advocate have abandoned covering that
story. Gay Liberation is instead reduced to a fight for the “right” to assimilate, to become
upfront military murderers for an arrogant imperial power, to get legally married and
create dysfunctional families all too much like the torturous “prisons” in which we were
each personally raised, to more thoroughly join in that vacuous, never-ending
consumption which is quickly destroying our once-lovely globe. The occasional
psychological views that do get mentioned in the gay press usually offer simplistic
platitudes that provide no real help in the necessary struggle to better differentiate
ourselves from collective conformity and become more fully developed, unique gay
individuals. I wrote my original critique and this two-part blog statement because of my
great love for our homosexual freedom movement, and because Mitch Walker is the only
person I know of who has offered consistent leadership in the just fight to continue a
true liberationist-oriented gay effort by arguing that Gay Liberation is now at a
watershed psychological crossroads because of assimilationist success, and that only by
more effectively confronting our dangerous gay shadows can we best continue our
emancipatory project to reach our greatest homosexual and humane potentials, our
richer same-sex-loving possibilities, to be not blinded members of a hypocritical cult of
false psychology but to be more fully realized, independent gay individuals who can
begin taking better ethical responsibility for all our actions in the world as we reach for
the best we can each authentically become, creatively, spiritually and lovingly.

Copyright © 2010 by Gay Psyche Politics Collective