Part 31: Transmutational Faerie, Continued
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.
The process of the group starts with a warm invitation to express a range of feelings from Eros to dark, dangerous ones like hurt and anger. Participants reacting in critical ways to others, especially newcomers, in the group is generally discouraged, though veterans of the process may be given more leeway, especially with one another. Usually, there’s enough time for every person to creatively show up during the two-hour period though no one is obliged to speak.
The facilitator encourages participants of the group to express themselves, usually one at a time, especially feelings, passion, and emotion, positive and negative, though conversing and debate is also generally encouraged up to a point. While it might be a little unsettling for newcomers, we want to encourage dialogue which can make for some hot and heavy excitement. Participants can also expect the facilitator to engage and respond to their feelings and thoughts, and limits may need to be gently maintained, strongly if necessary. Such parameters are judged by the facilitator according to respect for the topic focus and time considerations.
Sharing in the Club meetings can involve whatever one feels in the moment about their own inner gay spirit work in terms of struggles of daily existence, pertinent concerns over the state of the world, as well as the more esoteric level of ideas and visions, and perhaps most challenging, childhood trauma from a vicious heteronormative world. It’s suggested that addressing in supportive gay community one’s core trauma and its deeply inhibiting effect on sincere expressions of gay love and caring, can transformatively lead to some unusually meaningful experiences.
This book was published at the tail end of the exuberantly magical, psychedelically creative, boldly sexually experimental early period of the gay liberation movement. During this time, expression of an undeniably powerful gay spirit, of real love and authentic possibility, burst into the open in a big way in many Western cultures, ignited by the 1969 Stonewall riots, and Mitch tried to capture that fervent emancipational spirit in an intricately developed psychological framework, with the hope that such an ephemeral experience could continue to be liberationally cultivated. Shortly after the book’s publication, that spirit in the gay community 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), and that spirit at the same time also ongoingly fueled an extraordinary fight for LGBT rights in all major public institutions, such as marriage, the military, housing and employment. What has happened since the success of that fight, what Mitch foresaw as a threat four decades ago, has been the emergence of a new historical condition, a sort of gay normalization in which the gay spirit vision has been assimilated and neutered by the social myth system.
Yet that gay spirit has not been entirely extinguished, since it smolders even if unawares in every homosexual heart, no matter the social world around it, and there are still folks inspired by and trying to conscientiously address it such as this Gay-Centered Inner Work Club. Here is an opportunity to immerse yourself a little in a most unusual educational setting, one where our gay natures can be validated, stimulated, shared and related to, where gay spirit inner work as a viable alternative to neutering systemic extraversion can be introduced, supported and practiced manumissionally with one another.
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: