This Meeting's Topic

Each month’s meeting of the Gay-Centered Inner Work Club features an unfolding set of topics to explore and help guide things. For the past months, these topics have been gleaned from the pioneering book, Visionary Love, A Spirit Book of Gay Mythology 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 great 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 is one small part in a series that has been exploring Mitch’s visions in “Becoming Gay Shamanism,” the second part of this book. Tonight we’ll focus discussion on the homosexual deity powering Mitch Walker’s life “story” and how a remarkable visionary activism led Mitch to the gay spiritual path of “finding your trueself,” on pages 45 to 48. Mitch intended that his work would inspire others to envision and invoke that magickal gay spirit that can lead to trueself self-becoming.

The club frequently references Jungian, among many psychological ideas and theories, that can help gay folk orient in a gay-centered soulful way, two such examples are a same-sex soul archetype, named by Mitch Walker the “Double,” commonly “known” when projected onto hot same-sex others whom we lust after or fall in love with, and also it’s gay motivic animator, “Uranian Eros,” which can be pictured as an intelligent, homoerotically vitalizing spirit essence who we personificationally come to know as the animating fire of an inner lover, that innate intelligence which guides us to become same-sex oriented and then ego-identified with that subjectively, named in reference to the distinct “son” of that discrete goddess of heavenly love, Aphrodite Urania, described in Plato’s Symposium two and a half millennia ago.

And as always, if there’s a main emphasis of this Club meeting it will be on sharing whatever we feel in the moment especially about our own inner gay spirit work, as well as how we’re all affected by, and how we affect, the state of the world, thereby contributing to a very unusual communal 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 gay spirit, of real love and possibility, burst out into the open in a big way in Western cultures, ignited by Stonewall, and Mitch tried to capture that fervent 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 also ongoingly fueled an extraordinary fight for LGBT rights in public institutions, such as homosexual marriage. What has happened next, what Mitch foresaw as a threat four decades ago, has been emergence of a historical condition where the gay spirit “Vision is preempted by the [societal] myth system” detrimentally.

There had once been an explosion of an idealistic, consciousness-raising passion for what was known as “gay liberation,” an exuberant flowering of our gay spirit for a brief time through the 70s that occurred in many U.S. and European cities, and which now seems to have been almost completely extinguished these days by a devouring homophobic, heteronormative-capitalist system, or at least utterly coopted and replaced by nonthreatening LGBT “Normals,” and fringe clowns, the lucky few of us in the western world who have the unique privilege to experience a historical degree of social tolerance and assimilation into the mainstream, the price of which is our gay souls.

Yet that gay spirit has not been entirely extinguished, where it yet smolders even if unawares in every homosexual heart, and where it is conscientiously being addressed as with as this Gay-Centered Inner Work Club. 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 systemic extraversion can be supported and practiced emancipationally with one another.

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