Part 16: Gay-Centered Inner Work

Saturday December 4th 2021

Join us on Zoom

from 7:00-9:00 PM PDT

with Chris Kilbourne moderating

A Practical Community Discussion on

How Mitch Walker’s Seminal Book

Visionary Love; A Spirit Book of Gay Mythology

Is More Relevant than Ever

Part 17: The Last Stage in Personality Development: The Path of ROIKA, the Vision of ROIKA-YAN and Opening Up to Psychic Death

Reference page 34 through 36

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A tax-deductible $20 suggested donation is much appreciated.

This Meeting's Topic

Each month’s meeting of the Gay-Centered Inner Work Club features an unfolding set of themes to explore and help guide things. For the past months, these themes and more specific topics have been gleaned from the pioneering book, Visionary Love, A Spirit Book of Gay Mythology and Transmutational Faerie by Mitch Walker, which can be seen as a remarkable Call to a more contemporary form of activism, one that starts within and is experienced with each other and in community.

Visionary Love offers a plethora of thought-provoking ideas with a clear-eyed gay-centered perspective that addresses how to combat the epidemic of demonizing hate and projective violence in the external world around us by focusing inward to invest in and investigate the spiritual nature of our gayness and the source of our own projections. Mitch identifies and describes in depth explorations and experiences involving his own gay self-discoveries and learnings, which he frames as a roadmap composed of mythologies that can lead to an extraordinary, mystical vision of gay self-development and loving community activism.

This Meeting's Focus

This sixteenth part in a series continues the exploration of Mitch’s third, coming out, stage of gay personality development, which is thought of not so much as about the common, more extraverted understanding of letting the world know about one’s true identity, but as an introvert-oriented “quest for ontological security through the resolution of conflicting self-identities.” More specifically, developing a gay identity involves a high-stakes “inner battle” between the forces of a gay self-concept that he names ROIKA, described in several intriguing ways including “the root and potential in being gay,” versus those of a “falseself,” that’s rooted initially in the heteronormative family/society and, later after “coming out,” in the “Myth of the Homosexual.” Also to be addressed as still critically relevant in today’s world, will be his ideas on a same-sex soul archetype, the “Double” and it’s gay motivic partner, “Uranian Eros,” an intelligent, erotically vitalizing spirit essence and guide in becoming same-sex oriented and identified subjectively, a figure named in reference to the “son” of Plato’s goddess of heavenly love, Aphrodite Urania, described in his Symposium.

And as always, a main emphasis of this Club meeting will be on sharing whatever we feel in the moment about our own inner gay spirit work communally, as well as relevant concerns about the state of the world, and thereby contributing to a very unusual experience.

Mitch Walker’s Visionary Love and the Sweep of History So Far

This book was published in 1980 during the tail end of the exuberantly magical, psychedelically creative, boldly sexually experimental early period of the gay liberation movement. During this time, the expression of an undeniably powerful spirit, of real love and possibility, burst into the open in a big way in Western cultures, heralded by the Stonewall riots of 1969, and Mitch tried to capture that fervent spirit in an intricately developed psychological framework, with the hope that such an ephemeral subjective experience could continue to be cultivated. Shortly after its publication, that community spirit certainly found new life in the extraordinary fight against AIDS and the neglectful holocaustal Reagan regime (which laid a lot of the groundwork for the current, unending horrors of right-wing terrorism), as well as fueling an extraordinary fight for LGBT rights in public institutions. But what happened next, as Mitch foresaw four decades ago, was emergence of a historical condition where the gay “Vision is preempted by the [societal] myth system.”

And so here we are, in which the exuberant flowering of our gay spirit from the early 70s on has come to be pretty well coopted by the heteronormative system, that idealistic passion now extinguished and replaced by the empty, nonthreatening packaging of LGBT Normals, eccentrics, and clowns, all this change occurring in an astonishingly short amount of historical time. The level of social tolerance achieved can be seen as a reward for our long victimization, at least for a lucky few mainly in the Western World, and at least for the time being.

But the gay spirit has not been entirely extinguished. There are a few who yet actively address this perversely neglectful situation, as this Club meeting signifies. Here is an opportunity to immerse yourself a little in a most unusual educational setting, where our gay natures can be validated, stimulated, shared and related with, and where gay spirit inner work as a viable alternative to extraversion can be supported and practiced with one another.

About the Club

The Gay-Centered Inner Work Club iinvites anyone interested to participate in helping cultivate depthful community that celebrates the divine nature and potential of same-sex love through psychological work where you don’t have to be gay to appreciate and see your own unique vision through this particular lens. This Club emphasizes the development of a subjective relational attitude in self and with others through mutual exploration into relevant subjects like the evening’s topic with its related theory and practice, as well as any pertinent dreams, fantasies, memories, and especially feelings that may range all the way from unpleasant or unacceptable, such as fear, shame and anger, on to the more positive side, including joy, desire and love. Gay liberation is here approached psychologically in a Jungian sense as a subjectively experienced disentanglement and freeing of ego-Self relations from the clutches of unconscious complexes expressing destructive heterosexist parental dynamics and other early childhood traumas.

A Uranian way of connecting with one another would be to start within your own gay psyche, where the deeply gratifying work of fey psychological alchemy, undertaken chiefly by productively engaging those complexes and other big feelings and issues in a relational way so as to mercurially transform the lead of what internalized homophobia has ruinously wrought into the phoenix gold of better soulful becoming, a challenging but deeply rewarding effort to grow more human and more spiritual as gay, a task usefully undertaken in supportive communion with like-minded others, and experience the Club is meant to supply. By persisting in this way, we can choose to work affectingly towards creating a world of genuineness, beauty and creative possibilities.

Don’t forget to have a notebook handy in which to write and draw!

The experience will be facilitated by Chris Kilbourne, long-time activist, and is sponsored by the nonprofit educational organization Treeroots.

A $2-20 suggested, tax deductible donation is much appreciated:

Or donate to Treeroots-Inc on Venmo (phone number ending in 8681). Or mail your donation to: 1014 N. Gardner St., West Hollywood, CA 90046. For more information, please call 323-252-8824.

Thank you!