About This Event

Each month’s meeting of the Gay-Centered Inner Work Club features a developing topic. This month we continue to honor the pioneering book, Visionary Love, A Spirit Book of Gay Mythology by Mitch Walker as a powerful Call to a more contemporary form of activism, one that starts within but is experienced with each other.

Mitch offers many thought-provoking notions and perspectives that can help combat the epidemic of demonizing hate and projective violence in the external world around us, by mainly going inward and investigating our own gay souls. This means in part, addressing any subconscious complicity with and allegiance to that internalized violence which works against our own more-valued natures and thwarts our potential to be able to transformationally, alchemically handle what we discover within, as well as to take more effective action in the world around us.

To that end, the Club focus for this fourteenth part in a series will be on what Mitch has identified as the third stage in gay personality development, coming-out. We’ll explore how coming-out can be understood psychologically as “a quest for ontological security through the resolution of conflicting self-identities”, and how such a concept of coming-out has evolved towards a more differentiated psychological practice today, still involving the beloved “Double soul”, as well as “Uranian Eros,” and “subjective gay being”. 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, thereby contributing to a very unusual experience.

Visionary Love, A Spirit Book of Gay Mythology, by Mitch Walker, was published in 1980 at the peak 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 into the world... and shortly thereafter seemed virtually silenced with the decimation of the gay community from AIDS and the rise of the Reagan regime, which laid a lot of the groundwork for the horror of Trumpism.

More than 700,000 people in the U.S. alone have died of this disease so far, such substantial mortality due in no small part to Reagan's homicidal neglect early on, as well as to other more-obvious culprits, for example right-wing religious fanatics and other hate groups. But in the culpability department can also be placed seemingly supportive progressives who have had a deleterious effect on our “gay spirit” and thus our mental and even physical health through espousing such homosexual-negating ideas as conveyed in postmodern “queer theory.” These forces have conspired to annihilate, subsume, dilute, or coopt the extraordinary nature of same-sex eros Mitch celebrates in Visionary Love.

Nowadays, even with the current, astonishing historical level of social tolerance, at least for some, compared to the recent past, the idea of the emancipation of our extraordinary potentials as homosexual has been for the most part forgotten as we have been steadfastly corralled into conforming with the hetero mainstream and its oppressive sex-roles and false-self myth system.

But not entirely. There are still many ways to actively address this pervasively neglected situation. Engaging in gay-centered inner work can be a particularly powerful method. But even simple gestures could be helpful in the effort to value the endogenous gayness in gay identity, such as to mindfully put-up rainbow flags or images of rainbows prominently throughout your home, or the same with hot same-sex images, or by invoking the idea of gay liberation the next time you have sex, or writing your dreams down in a special journal and thinking about them in a gay way. And, of course, there is also the possibility of getting involved with the gay-centered inner work community by attending a Club meeting. Here is the chance to immerse yourself a little in a most unusual educational setting, where our gay natures can be validated, stimulated, shared and related with, where inner work as a viable alternative to extraversion can be described and tried.

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