Reply to Malcolm Boyds February 20, 2012 Huffington Post piece entitled, Gay Spirituality and the Radical

Faeries a book review of The Fire In Moonlight: Stories from the Radical Faeries, edited by Mark Thompson

By Douglas Sadownick

Malcolm Boyds February 20, 2012 Huffington Post review of The Fire In Moonlight: Stories from the Radical Faeries, edited by Mark Thompson, disregards any interest in objectivity and fair reporting due to what I surmise to be about a dangerous ulterior political motive. It is a standard in fair media writing that reviewers disclose their relationship to the author they are covering if a dual relationship exists. But Boyd fails to mention that the editor of the book he is reviewing is his longtime life partner. He makes this omission, it would seem to me, so that he can hide the fact of a central controversial schism in Radical Faerie history in which his lover played a part (which is also ignored in Thompsons Fire book). The following statement is based on my own longterm participation in the California-based gay spirituality community being discussed, including a past friendship with Mark Thompson, the editor of the book Boyd is reviewing, as well as personal relationships with the other prominent figures being discussed here.

The Radical Faerie movement is historically important because it was the first large-scale effort to organize gay-identified men on an indigenously homosexual spiritual basis, unlike gay synagogues, churches, and so on, which rely on heterosexist mythologies and dogmas. The Faerie movement was organized

principally by three individuals: Harry Hay (co-founder of the Mattachine Society in 1950), Don Kilhefner (co-founder of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center in 1971), and Mitch Walker (the first out gay author to be published in a Jungian journal in 1976). (A fourth person, Harrys partner John Burnside, served as a supporting figure). Walker not only was a primary architect of this movement, he was also the leader behind the controversial move to introduce a gay-centered psychology into Faerie organizing. This history can be found in the standard accepted history to date of Harry Hay by Stuart Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay (a revised edition has been published by White Crane Books, with the same basic text as the original 1990 version).

But Boyd, following in the footsteps of other disgruntled participants in the Gay Spirit movement, mendaciously ignores the formulational role Mitch Walker, according to Timmons biography, played, along with Harry Hay, in developing the idea of a grassroots political movement based in Gay Spirit (and how Don Kilhefner was brought in later for his organizational capacities). Boyd writes dishonestly: The book honors two men who played a key pioneering role, Harry Hay and Don Kilhefner, thereby obliterating Mitch Walkers key role.

Boyd must have been aware of a very recent, public controversy that took place in the pages of the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide (GLR), the intellectual magazine of record in the gay community. In my article in the January-February 2011 issue of the GLR, The Secret Story of the Radical Faeries, I reported on the ways in which Don Kilhefners retelling of Faerie history in his The Radical

Faeries at Thirty + 1, article, published in the September-October 2010 issue of the GLR, is notable not only for its erasure of important aspects of gay history, but also for its rejection of a psychological approach to gay-centered individuation and community building. I wrote that there is a complex layer of history thats often left out and thus rendered secret.

In my GLR article, I also called attention to the implicational importance, for gay liberations spiritual potentials, of the Radical Faerie schism that erupted during the heyday of Faerie organizing, which Don Kilhefner erased as if it didnt happen, and as if he had not played a major role in it: A gay-centered psychoanalytic movement or revolution, I wrote, based on transforming unfinished family business, unexamined motives, and internalized homophobia into genuine gay self-realization, spearheaded by Mitch Walker, emerged from within the Faerie endeavor at its beginnings. Walkers remarkable effort to bring psychological honesty to the organization was forged through confrontation with psychological dysfunction among its core leadership, especially regarding Harry Hay, who was rabidly anti-psychological and who attempted at every turn to block any serious efforts in an analytic direction. I would add now that the importance of that effort cant be understated, especially for an organization founded on celebrating the spiritual nature of gayness. Without psychological honesty, there can only be hypocrisy at best, and truly violent behavior at worst.

As I reported, Don was at the time, back in the early 1980s, profoundly supportive of Mitchs spiritual leadership as he eventually realized the

profoundly healing value of Mitchs novel perspective, becoming convinced that the Faeries needed to take up gay-centered psychological activism. I added that Don and Mitch, banding together and seeing no alternative recourse, resigned from the organizing circle during a climactic meeting in 1981, going on the next year to form Treeroots, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to psychologicallyoriented homosexual self-realization. Mark Thompson, the editor of Fire in the Moonlight, avidly joined with Don and Mitch to leave Radical Faerie organizing efforts, and helped form Treeroots, a widely accepted accounting of which can be found in Timmons biography of Harry Hay.

But ultimately, neither Don nor Mark could sustain their engagement with the growing Treeroots community that valued psychological responsibility, and both men eventually broke off from their relationship to Mitch, Treeroots, and other involved gay-centered psychological associates (in Marks case, that also included me). Even though Mark had been Mitchs friend and devoted colleague in gaycentered inner work for more than two decades, which included Marks own decade-long alienation from Don, once Mark rejected those of us working with Treeroots, he collusively rejoined forces with Don to participate in a rewriting of Faerie history, to publicly ignore the important historical record regarding his own and Dons key roles in the Radical Faerie schism.

A group of 2o or s0 gay-centered psychological activists, including myself, protested a public retrospective on Radical Faerie history given by Mark Thompson and Don Kilhefner in February 2009 at the One National Gay &

Lesbian Archives. We called attention to how each of them was glaringly leaving out key aspects of Radical Faerie history, including the many experiences of unconscious ugly behaviors and anti-psychological attitudes that have always been a problem in the Faerie scene, generally, which they themselves for many years militantly championed against. Our political action was followed up by the creation of a blog with numerous lengthy, thoughtful posts (gaypsychepolitics.blogspot.com), which are now being collected into a forthcoming book, Lavender Self-Awakening.

In my GLR piece I proposed a psychological explanation as to why Don would so thoroughly betray the ideas hed been devoted to for about a decade: I would argue that Don is colluding with the gay communitysall of humanityspresent collective dissociation, which regressively blocks the key importance of personal psychological responsibility, that is, the fundamental problem (and potential) of the gay shadow, from mainstream movement discourse. I suggested that all of us, myself included, possess a fiercely anti-gay and anti-psychological complex that grievously evades conscious detection, camouflaged under rampant addictions, compulsive extroversion, assimilationism, and so on. I wrote that what is needed is Faerie support for those who courageously face the darkness in their own personal psychology to better expedite Gay Spirit.

Both Mark and Don are in my experience hostile to the project of better gaycentered psychological mindfulness, repeatedly demonstrated by their continuing efforts to erase the important ways in Mitch Walker pursued and continues to

promote, gay-centered psychological theory and practice in Radical Faerie organizing.

Now Malcolm Boyd in his review of Mark Thompsons Fire book publicly outs himself as an official member of the anti-psychological dissemblers, and shows his knack for historical distortion not unlike that seen in totalitarian regimes. What seems like a benign puff piece is actually homophobically depriving gay people not just of their full history but of a series of life-saving ideas as to how to transform internalized homophobia into gay self-esteem and wholeness in a practical and grassroots manner. As I conclude in my GLR piece, The issue at heart in this entire matter of Radical Faerie history and meaning throws us a big existential question: will gay people and gay liberation slouch backwards to sterile nostalgia, or instead strive bravely toward an ennobled gay future that involves tackling more efficaciously what is still terribly destructive in ourselves so we can ascend to a regenerated, better enlightened gay life most relevant to humanitys pressing climacteric challenge?

Readers wishing to know more are directed to my article (www.uranianpsych.org/articles) as well as to Timmons biography, The Trouble with Harry Hay, which, while biased against Walkers gay-centered psychological activism, at least treats his ideas as integral to the founding and development of the faerie movement.