Document:Stonewall Experiment epilogue

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1995

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The Life Force is like a juggler; it is always contriving that we shall watch the hand with which the trick is not being done. When we look back, we often discover that it was the symptom we were studying, not the cause. And yet it is hard to learn. Next time we are certain we shall not be deceived; we shall have no preconceptions as to what is important, what negligible. Everything shall be seen steadily and whole. It is of little use. Surprised at our own patience in considering it at all, we dismiss the clue without a misgiving, assured that it is a trifle. We ought to be learning that the very sensation of amusement at our own tolerance should warn us that we are being bamboozled. — Gerald Heard, Narcissus: An Anatomy of Clothes (1924)

As the year 2000 approaches, it is becoming apparent that the gay movement is not, as had been generally assumed, on the margins of contemporary history, but rather at its center, and that Stonewall was, in the words of cultural historian Camille Paglia, "a central event in cultural history" (1).

Commentators on the new phenomenon of the homosexual used to refer to us as a "sport of nature", a kind of false limb on the evolutionary tree. When the faggots at the Stonewall rioted, people were surprised, assuming so bizarre an event to be of little importance. When a generation of young gays began to make America uncomfortable, the nation's response to people it regarded as sick and criminal was to circumscribe the effects of our behavior by franchising us to institutions it regarded as our natural, traditional overseers: the medical profession and the criminal underworld. Our past was marketed back to us, artfully disguised as our future. At the time, it seemed an acceptably liberal solution. But the resulting social experiment turned out to have far-reaching and disastrous consequences. Society projected its collective guilt feelings about sex, drugs and race onto some of its most feared and despised groups, leading them to act out destructive behaviours that reflected its own excesses. Guilt-fantasies of poisoned blood contributed to the mass sacrificial ritual that ensued, with the outcasts succumbing in large numbers to the consequences of the shared belief system.

The modern world has embarked on numerous grand social experiments, often with devastating results for those involved. The earliest use of the word "experiment" in this sense seems to have been by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, writing in 1812 on the wholesale transportation of Britain's "criminal class" to the penal colonies of Australia. This endeavor, he wrote, "was indeed a measure of experiment...but the subject-matter of experiment was, in this case, a peculiarly commodious one; a set of animate viles, a sort of excrementitious mass, that could be projected, and accordingly was projected...as far out of sight as possible" (2). Bentham's description recognized that his candidates for transportation were regarded as both troublesome and somehow less than human. The attitude was typical of other grand experiments to come.

The American nation was itself born of social experiment. Its founding principles were slavery, genocide, and the belief that all men are created equal and entitled to the pursuit of happiness. Its attempts to deal with the problems posed by blacks, native peoples, and psychiatric inmates, can all be seen, in the one-way light of history, as gigantic social experiments, with the ghetto, the reservation and the sanitarium as dumping grounds and laboratories, where the various animae viles were transported "as far out of sight as possible" and rendered inert.

In time, we have come to realize that these schemes were cruel and foolish. Yet when they were instituted, genocide and slavery were not deliberated as matters of policy, their every detail meticulously plotted around a polished oak table by conspiratorial cabals of evil men. Rather they reflected unconscious prejudices and assumptions, cloaked in high-minded rhetoric. Quentin Crisp once remarked that "the atom bomb wasn't built by a wild fanatic, trying to bring the vengeance of an angry god onto a wicked and adulterous generation. No, the bomb was made by a man with a noble forehead and silver hair, sitting in the middle of a desert and cutting up the atom while saying, 'Pity!'" (3).

One of the most telling phrases of the modern age is The Revolution Betrayed. Trotsky used it as the title of his brilliant, bitter polemic against the way the Bolshevik experiment turned out, but it could serve as epitaph for almost any social upheaval of recent times. Betrayal and apparent failure are the fate of all revolutions; if only in that compromises are inevitable and expectations frustrated. Success comes too of course, for the degree and details of every failure also shape history. The emergence of gay people over the past 125 years constitutes a revolution whose successes have yet to be fully felt. Its failures are recorded every day in the obituaries.

Our civilization is good at imputing blame; it's one of the things we do best. And it is good at guilt and denial. In guilt we accuse and lacerate ourselves, and do not move, and in denial, we whirl around blindly pointing the finger at others. We create angry, clashing armies of victims, persecutors, avengers and scapegoats. And the futility and hatred piles up, blocking our way. There is certainly enough blame to go around, if we want to the blame game, because almost everyone collaborated in the co-opting of the Stonewall Experiment: government, physicians, pharmaceutical companies, organized crime, the churches, the public – and ourselves.

For a while, the gay men of the AIDS era will probably cling reflexively, self-protectively, to our partial numbness. An analyst of the psychology of warfare has observed that "during moments of extreme stress, combat soldiers are often called upon to act regardless of how they are feeling. Their survival depends upon their ability to suspend feelings in favor of taking steps to ensure their safety. Unfortunately, the resulting 'split' between one's self and one's experience does not heal easily. It does not gradually disappear with the passage of time. Until an active process of healing takes place, the individual continues to experience a constriction of feelings, a decreased ability to recognize which feelings are present and a persistent sense of being cut off from one's surroundings...a condition known as psychic numbing." (4) As long as the epidemic continues, our partial numbness will continue with it. Preoccupied with taking care of our lovers and friends, we have not yet given full vent to our grief – or our anger.

For the Stonewall and immediate post-Stonewall generations, our health crisis is the central psychic event that will remain with us and affect us for the rest or our lives. But another generation of gay men will want its own perspective on events, will need to know our history – what we sought and what happened to us, as we tried to make our way "over the rainbow".

In his classic study Understanding Media, philosopher Marshall McLuhan identified as a central symbol of our modern, technological society the figure of Narcissus, whose myth inspired Oscar Wilde to create Dorian Gray (5). The classic Narcissus myth has two versions: a heterosexual one, which is well known, and a gay one, which has been neglected. In the gay version, Narcissus is a city boy: "He was very handsome but scorned the joys of love. He was loved by a young man, Ameinias, but did not love him in return, kept rejecting him and finally sent him a present of a sword. Ameinias used the sword to commit suicide in front of Narcissus' door, calling down curses on Narcissus as he died." Yet even this terrible tragedy did not free Narcissus from his trance; he did not take up his staff and wander into the desert meditating on love, death and immortality, like Gilgamesh after his companion, the wild man Enkidu, mysteriously sickened and died. Instead he gazed into a pool, fell – finally – in love, and, desperate with passion, drowned (6).

Echos of this appalling tale resonate through many of the gay myths alluded to in these pages – not so much because there is anything intrinsically narcissistic about gay men, but because we find ourselves in a narcissistic society, and because the myth of Narcissus holds a special danger for us.

Narcissism is the entranced denial of love, and of self. Whatever our sexuality, if we are too mesmerized by our gadgets, our materialism, or our image of ourselves, to hear the voice of Ameinias, or respond to his love, then he will turn away, and when he returns to us it will be as a victim of the sword we have handed him. If there is blood on our doorstep and curses in our ears, we should at least consider the reasons.

The gay version of the Narcissus tragedy is a prototype of the myth of the homosexual – a myth that has pervaded our history, and whose most insidious aspect has been our unconsciousness of it. Beliefs have consequences – and unconscious beliefs are no exception.

It is said that the Reformation and the concomitant decline of orthodox religion led to a drastic drop in the use of church candles, and consequently, in the demand for beeswax. Less beeswax meant less honey, which led to a demand for a substitute – sugar. And the rising demand for sugar was one of the chief motives for the development of slavery in the West Indies. The new attitudes being ushered in by religious reform included eloquent ideological justifications for the enslavement of non-Europeans on sugar plantations.

Recent newspaper reports tell of a tribe of Indians in the desert of the American Southwest, living in shacks with no electricity or running water. A few yards above them run the power lines upon which the white man's cities depend. Living direcdy under the power grid, the Indian children have an extraordinarily high incidence of leukemia, and the community is blighted with other cancers.

No cabals issued edicts to suppress honey, or put Indian villagers to death. Thoughts and beliefs ("The only good Indian is a dead Indian") manifest themselves nonetheless.

The idea of buggery was literally a heresy, a theological error practiced by Bulgars, Bogomils, bugger boys and boogey men. It was "the abominable crime not to be mentioned among Christians". At Oscar Wilde's trial, the judge reminded him that "there is no greater crime" than the one he had committed! It takes longer than a mere century for such long-established sentiments to vanish. At best they become covert, unconsciously retained. They go underground, and remain the deeply held beliefs of a society, affecting all its members.

As long as those beliefs were couched in theological terms, the penalty for male/male sex remained death by execution, or some substitute for it. When the anathematization began to be viewed in terms of the new, medical paradigm, Homeros became medicalized, as an illness, a contagion, a baccillus, a virus. A virus that kills. Graffiti proclaimed: AIDS = Anally Injected Death Sentence. Millenia of belief had finally come true. The fear had manifested. The rejected god had reappeared as a disease, and his followers now moved about as though in a trance.

Gay men were caught in a mythic system which led to their own premature deaths. As William Burroughs said of his own characters, "None of [them] are free. If they were free, they would not still be conditioned in the mythological system, that is, the cycle of conditioned action." (7)

Even after the riots under the full moon at Stonewall broke the trance, gay men continued to respond to posthypnotic suggestions buried in our myths and reinforced by repeated messages, some overt, some subliminal.

Future generations will need to shed some of these old myths and replace them with other, gentler myths of healing and reconciliation, myths explored and articulated by a lineage of gay teachers, writers, philosophers and prophets, from Socrates onward: among them, the myth of the shaman, who is the wounded healer, and the myth of the androgyne, who is the embodiment of a more evolved, more harmonious stage of human evolution.

In the early days of Gay Liberation, Gary Alinder wrote a piece called "My gay soul", in which he said: "I need to be together with other Gay men. We have not been together – we've not had enough self respect for that. Isolated sex and then look for another partner. Enough of that, that's where we've been. Let's go somewhere where we value each other as more than a hunk of meat. We need to recognize one another wherever we are, start talking to each other. We need to say "Hi, Brother!" when we see each other on the street.... Our Gay souls have nearly been stomped to death here in that desert called America. If we are to bloom, we can only do it together. I need you, brother, because you are all I have." (8)

That loving need has to be rediscovered by every generation of gay men. We must learn that the Gay Spirit is not something that can be oppressed without incurring terrible consequences. We have to learn that we are not just a "sport of nature" but a force of history.

In the spring of 1992, I made another excursion to New York. Though I had made several return trips since my walk through a depopulated Christopher Street five years before, nothing I had seen had displaced those desolate images from my memory. This trip was different.

I was with Jamie – the first time we'd been in the city together since 1980 – and the gay community that we found in the New York of 1992 was a community in recovery. Many of the friends and acquaintances I spent time with were, in different ways, coming to understand and heal the wounds of the past. Some were recovering from alcohol and drug addictions or other compulsive behaviors. Some were dealing with the consequences of rejection. Some had taken up spiritual disciplines or were volunteers in community programs.

My friend Joe Kadlec took me to lunch with a group where he helped to cook meals once or twice a week, the Manhattan Center for Living, an organization of people experiencing "life-challenging" illness of any kind, including AIDS and cancer. Joe took me to the Center's cheery third-floor dining room in their headquarters on Broadway in Lower Manhattan. We took our places at one of the large round tables set for lunch and were served tasty organic vegetarian food in an atmosphere of relaxed friendliness which had a slightly manic, excited undertone, contributing to an aura of good-humored expectancy. One of our fellow diners explained to me that many of the people in the room were on various sorts of medications which rendered them temporarily hyper, uncoordinated or semi-comatose. They seemed no different from any other group of restaurant patrons.

As Joe chatted with an elderly woman friend (they were comparing last night's dreams) I looked at the list of available workshops posted on the bulletin board: Shiatsu; Dating for HIV+ Gay Men; Divine Dance; Recovery – a Personal Journey to Health; Healing Shame; Sex, Love and Intimacy; Introduction to Iridology; Men's Bereavement Group; and, one that particularly caught my eye: Healing False Beliefs. And, next to it, someone had pinned up something Mother Teresa had said when she was asked about PWAs: "They are all Jesus Christ, in a distressing disguise." We were back with Sebastian, and the sacrificial son.

What struck me most of about the Center was its unselfconscious mix of people, regardless of sexuality, age, background or personal style. These things remained interesting and significant, but were no longer important, a big deal. We were all in the same boat, and staying afloat meant the chains that weighed us down had to be tossed overboard.

The changed atmosphere in the city seemed to support what the statistics were suggesting. Though the health crisis was by no means over (we would lose many more friends and lovers before the big party we were already planning for New Year's Eve 1999: "WE SURVIVED THE TWENTIETH CENTURY!") we were finally beginning to regain control of the experiment (9).

That night after I returned to Toronto, I went to visit some friends and decided to walk home along one of my favorite streets, Danforth Avenue, the broad main street of the city's large Greek community. One side of the street had been cordoned off and was crowded with pedestrians, and I soon found myself walking slowly and deliberately with them, as part of the funeral procession of a young Greek man, a popular entertainer.

At the head of the procession were six young women strewing flower petals. Next came a single man carrying, propped against his chest, a framed portrait of the deceased. A few feet behind walked the mourning family and close friends, dressed in black. Then a row of musicians singing slow, dance-like dirges accompanied by bouzouki, accordion, triangle and drum. Finally, the slow lines of the other mourners, and the growing crowd. It occurred to me that this solemn, dignified ritual was very ancient – far predating Christianity. It had survived, virtually unchanged, for thousands of years, and travelled half way around the world.

I walked with the gathering procession for many blocks, eventually absorbed by the emotional crowd, in tears along with them. In mourning for this young man I did not know, I was mourning for all the dead young men I had known, many of whom were given no such public ceremony to honour them and mark their passing.

When I slipped away from the funeral march and headed into the subway, a memory flashed into my mind – of a gay man, an actor and a friend of Joe's, whom I'd met briefly at the Center for Living. He was helping out in the kitchen, dressed in his cook's apron and a T-shirt with a picture on it of a dancing lizard, which looked rather like an antic version of the lizard sent to Oscar Wilde during his trial. The man came over to tell us about a marvellous new show he was in, based on the works of Edward Gorey. The show was apparently gory in other ways too, with lots of spectacular on-stage deaths. Joe's friend beamed and his hands made an expansive gesture. "Lots of death!" he informed us gleefully; "Lots of death! I'm getting it all out of my system!"

###

As this book neared completion, Jamie died – on 1 December, World AIDS Day, 1993. He was thirty-two.

One of the first things the Sorcerer (that was my name for him) ever said to me was, "Life is Magic!" One at the last things he said to me was, "It's all mental". What he tanght me in between enabled me to write this book, which he never read, but whose existence he knew of. He is with many of his brothers now, some of whose names appear in my Acknowledgements. His gay spirit lives on. The experiment continues.

Notes

© 1995 by Ian Young