Part 41: Transmutational Faerie, Continued
Saturday January 6th, 2023
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 41:
Transmutational Faerie
Continued
Reference page 71
to the end of the book
A tax-deductible $20 suggested donation is much appreciated.
Venmo at Treeroots-Inc.,
use phone number ending in 8681
Mail to: 1014 N. Gardner St., West Hollywood, CA 90046.
The Club's Overarching Theme
The monthly meetings of the Gay-Centered Inner Work Club have drawn upon an unfolding set of themes to explore and help guide the group process. For the two and a half years these themes and more specific topics have been gleaned from the pioneering 1980 book, Visionary Love, A Spirit Book of Gay Mythology and Transmutational Faerie by Mitch Walker, a remarkable Call to a more contemporary form of activism, one that starts within as a mystical journey that can be experienced psychologically with one another 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 Particular Focus
During this thirty-third part of a remarkable in-depth examination of Visionary Love, we’ll be continuing to read the third essay, called Transmutational Faerie which begins on page 70. In the essay, Mitch sought to invoke the experience of spiritual rituals held at the 1st national Radical Faerie gathering in the Sonora desert of Arizona during Labor Day week of 1979.
During the past two club sessions it was determined that we wouldn’t be able to adequately honor the invocation the way things had been structured. So instead of trying to speed through it and attempt to sing the words, which turned out to be too distracting, it was decided that we’d take our time and prioritize giving voice to participants’ experience of the material.
We’ll also be referencing relevant Jungian and other psychological, philosophical, historical, spiritual, cultural and political concepts and particularly, Mitch’s idea of a same-sex “soul figure” or archetype called the “Double,” who can be imagined as an inner lover ideal, the unconscious subjective presence behind every subsequent experience of same-sex arousal and love, projected onto living desired others and parallel hot imagery, such as porn.
Maybe especially important is his idea of Uranian Eros, seen as the vitalizing, intelligent spirit essence animating homo desire, arousal, romance and identity, an innate urge that at the same time can be likened to a “mentality,” a “person” or a “mighty daemon” who’d beckoned us implacably in the first place to become same-sex oriented and then appropriately ego-identified with that commanding homo alignment, named in reference to the distinct son of Aphrodite Urania, the goddess of heavenly love described more than 2,300 years ago in Plato’s Symposium.
Process Guidelines
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.
Mitch Walker’s Visionary Love and Its Relevance Today
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.
About the Club
The Gay-Centered Inner Work Club invites anyone interested to participate in helping cultivate depthful community that celebrates and explores the divine nature and potential of same-sex love through psychological work, for which where you don’t have to be personally gay to appreciate and better see your own unique vision of authentic becoming as revealed through this particular lens. This Club emphasizes the development in every person 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 valuationally all the way from unpleasant or unacceptable, such as fear, shame and anger, to the 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 that cripple authentic self-realization.
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 $20 donation is much appreciated
Or Treeroots-Inc on Venmo (phone number ending in 8681). Or mail to: 1014 N. Gardner St., West Hollywood, CA 90046. For more information, please call 323-252-8824.
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