Gay-Centered Inner Work Club
Meets on the First Saturday of Every Month
7:00-9:00 PM Pacific Time
Saturday May 4th, 2024
A Practical Community Discussion On How Mitch Walker’s Seminal Book
Visionary Love: A Spirit Book of Gay Mythology
Is More Relevant Than Ever
with Chris Kilbourne moderating
We’ll be specifically honoring the last, incantational section of “Transmutational Faerie,”
beginning on Page 70.
ABOUT THE CLUB
Everyone open to learning about psychological gay liberation is warmly invited to attend the monthly meeting of supportive gay-centered psychological activists invested in cultivating depthful grassroots community that better honors the divine value and legitimating potential of same-sex love in subjective self-experience through cultivating affirmative psychological inner work.
And you don’t have to be personally gay to appreciate and further develop your own unique vision of authentic self-becoming when your struggles to do so are framed within an authentic gay-centered context.
Any person could potentially beneficially experience the Club’s emphasis on enhancement of a subjective relational attitude towards self and others no matter who you are, and implemented as guided by the evening’s topic, related theory and practice, and pertinent dreams, fantasies, memories, and especially feelings shared by participants, even difficult ones such as fear, shame and anger, as well as joy, desire and love.
Gay liberation psychology amounts to gay-centered inner work, or in the version most focused on here, Uranian Psychoanalysis, and concerns a subjectively experienced disentanglement and freeing of ego-Self relations, in Jungian terms, towards being homosexually-oriented and away from the clutches of unconscious heterosexist parental- and other primary childhood trauma-complexes – considered the source of so many problems in our lives.
This is an integrative and alchemical, active-imaginational practice that aims to generate the better humanization and individuation of gay identity and existential being.
THE EVENING'S TOPIC
The monthly meetings of the Gay-Centered Inner Work Club have, for the past several years has drawn on the 1980 book, Visionary Love, A Spirit Book of Gay Mythology and Transmutational Faerie by Mitch Walker, published in 1980, which still holds up today as a powerful revolutionary 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 that plagues the external world around us by investing in and investigating the spiritual nature of our gayness as the source of the alchemizational potential locked up in our own demons and projections.
Culminating a months-long in-depth examination of Visionary Love, we’ve been taking our time reading the last of three essays, called “Transmutational Faerie,” which begins on page 70.
This unusual “essay” seeks to invoke the experience of spiritual rituals conducted at the first of three national Radical Faerie gatherings that was held in the Sonora desert of Arizona during Labor Day week of 1979.
So, actually an invocation, it transcends the time and place of its creation, as relevant as ever in these environmentally and politically fraught times.
The same-sex “soul figure” or archetype Mitch called the “Double” is also a an important guiding principle among the pantheon of ideas the group draws upon, which archetype can be imagined as an inner lover ideal, the (usually unconscious) subjective presence behind every experience of same-sex arousal and love, that inner presence which is projected onto living desired others and parallel hot imagery, such as porn.
Perhaps most 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 namesake of Uranian psychoanalysis, the goddess of heavenly love, described more than 2,300 years ago in Plato’s Symposium.
THE CLUB'S UNUSUAL PROCESS
The group sessions are conducted by the facilitator, Chris Kilbourne, in an organic manner, by usually introducing the evening’s topic and then inviting participants to share their feelings or thoughts.
The facilitator may draw people out to share, encourage discussion between participants and comment to help direct the discussion towards the topical focus, though emphasis is placed on the struggles of daily existence, pertinent concerns over the state of the world among other things, as well as on the more esoteric levels of ideas and visions, as well as specific childhood trauma from growing up gay in a hateful heteronormative world.
Dark feelings expressed towards other members are to some extent encouraged among practiced participants because the emotional heat generated from such kinds of challenges, when it can be healthily sustained, is especially valued as more-possibly transformative, though newer members can expect to be treated with respectful sensitivity around such matters.
It’s suggested that learning to transformatively work with core trauma and its deeply inhibiting effect on sincere expressions of gay love and caring in supportive gay community, can transformatively lead to some extraordinary emancipatory experiences.
Having a notebook handy in which to write and draw can also be helpful!
IN SUM
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.
That’s 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.
This amounts to a challenging but deeply rewarding effort to grow more human and more spiritual as gay, a task most usefully undertaken in supportive communion with like-minded others.
By persisting in this way, we can choose to work affectingly towards creating a world ripe with beauty, Eros and creative possibilities that’s grounded in psychological integrity and justice.
