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 sixteenth part in a series continues the exploration of Mitch’s third, coming out, stage of gay personality development, which is thought of not so much as about the common, more extraverted understanding of letting the world know about one’s true identity, but as an introvert-oriented “quest for ontological security through the resolution of conflicting self-identities.” More specifically, developing a gay identity involves a high-stakes “inner battle” between the forces of a gay self-concept that he names ROIKA, described in several intriguing ways including “the root and potential in being gay,” versus those of a “falseself,” that’s rooted initially in the heteronormative family/society and, later after “coming out,” in the “Myth of the Homosexual.” Also to be addressed as still critically relevant in today’s world, will be his ideas on a same-sex soul archetype, the “Double,” and it’s gay motivic partner, “Uranian Eros,” an intelligent, erotically vitalizing spirit essence and guide in becoming same-sex oriented and identified subjectively, a figure named in reference to the “son” of Plato’s goddess of heavenly love, Aphrodite Urania, 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 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 cultivated. Shortly after its publication, that 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), and ongoingly that spirit fueled an extraordinary fight for LGBT rights in public institutions. What happened next, Mitch foresaw four decades ago, a historical condition where the gay “Vision is preempted by the [societal] myth system.”

And here we are, where the exuberant flowering of our gay spirit from the early 70s on, it seems, has come to be utterly coopted by the heteronormative system, the idealistic passion now extinguished and replaced by the empty, nonthreatening packaging of LGBT Normals, eccentrics, and clowns, and occurring in an astonishingly short amount of time. Such a historical level of social tolerance for some can be seen as a reward for our long victimization, at least for a few lucky of us 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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