The Club's Overarching Theme

Each month’s meeting of the Gay-Centered Inner Work Club features an unfolding set of themes to explore and help guide things. For the past months, these themes and more specific 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 Particular Focus

This twenty-third part in a series continues to explore Mitch’s Taoist-Master-in-Drag invitation to a dangerous initiatory journey into the shamanic nature of being gay, and further fleshes out his framework for empowering growth by learning to transformationally cross the Rainbow Bridge. We’ll be examining his sixth key to such gay self-realization -- fear – and how to deal with it when encountering dark internal experiences in trying to reach the “death and decomposition of falseself that liberates existential being from the heteronormative matrix, on pages 48 through 53 or so. We’ll be relevantly referencing Jungian and other psychological, philosophical, historical and political ideas in tackling the topic, also emphasizing Mitch’s idea of a same-sex soul archetype called the “Double,” usually projected onto disired others, and it’s gay motivic animator, “Uranian Eros,” who can be pictured as the intelligent, homoerotically vitalizing spirit essence animating desire, arousal and romance, who we can relationally come to know as the personified soul of an inner lover ideal, that innate intelligence or “person” which beckons us implacably to become same-sex oriented and then appropriately ego-identified with that alignment, and who has been named in reference to the distinct son of Aphrodite Urania, that discrete goddess of heavenly love described in Plato’s Symposium two and a half millennia ago.

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, as well as relevant concerns about the state of the world, and thereby contributing to a very unusual experience.

Mitch Walker’s Visionary Love and Its Relevance Today

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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