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 eighteenth part in a series explores Visionary Love’s fourth and last stage of gay personality development, the path of ROIKA, which lies beyond the tormented coming-out stage and the subjective respite achieved where being identified as gay initially forms as another falseself, which he calls the “Myth of the Homosexual.” But ROIKA which represents for Mitch, among other things, the “root and potential in being gay,” by its very nature urges the attainment of the ultimate liberation from all soul-killing falseself identities. ROIKA is the realization of the vast potential in being gay for all things beautiful, egalitarian, loving, and otherwise ideal, and it unfolds through the “time/space doorway,” YAN, to reach the vast creative potential of the “cosmic starpoint,” LOKA, similar to an aspect of C.G. Jung’s idea of the transpersonal Self. This Club meeting especially focuses on how the “psychic death” needing to be encountered if one is to take the path of ROIKA seriously enough, a death related to one’s “darkest fears and destructive forces, to the evil inside”, initiates us into the shamanic consciousness, a state of mind that requires much support and encouragement from others.

Also to be addressed as still critically relevant in today’s world, will be Mitch’s ideas on a same-sex soul archetype, the “Double,” and it’s gay motivic partner, “Uranian Eros,” an intelligent, erotically vitalizing spirit essence as support and guide in the effort to realize ROIKA subjectively, a figure named in reference to the “son” of Plato’s goddess of heavenly love, Aphrodite Urania, as 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, 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 acheived 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.

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