Dragonfly (Les K. Wright)
At the recent (2023) tenth anniversary Bear Your Soul gathering at Easton Mountain, I participated in a workshop led by Wildflower (Tyler Wansley) called “Queer Icons.” Wildflower asked us to think about who had been influential in our experience of being gay. The icon could be living or dead, of any gender or sex, real or fictional. And we were asked to explain how that icon had affected us.
I quickly made a list—Auntie Mame, Allan Bérubé, Edith Piaf, Audre Lorde, John Waters, Harry Hay. I ended up talking about my friend Allan Bérubé, primarily because he had been my mentor, demonstrating to me how to do grassroots history. That had been what guided me when I did the Bear History Project and edited two books on early gay bear history. My work remains seminal because, instead of sifting through materials and extracting what I thought was important, I had done the radical thing of “letting the natives speak for themselves.”
Wildflower spoke briefly about Harry, glad I had mentioned him. Wildflower gave a quick overview of Harry as the founder of the Mattachine Society and the father of gay liberation. I added to that the fact that Harry had been a card-carrying Communist and when the Mattachine Society broke with its original radical roots and switched to assimilationist politics, Harry distanced himself from them. Sadly, no one else in the workshop had ever heard of Harry. Harry himself had expressed deep regret that gay people didn’t know their own history. (They still don’t.)
When I saw the call for “Queer Iconography/Icons” in RFD, I was still in the blissful afterglow of the Bear Your Soul heart space. I was rereading Will Roscoe’s Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of It Founder as the result of a conversation I had had with Billy Community elder Bill Blackburn about Harry’s concept of “subject-subject consciousness” and its manifestation in Billy space. I had experienced it again, in spades, at the Bear Your Soul gathering. This was all just as I had first experienced it at radical faerie gatherings. I recognized that faeries, Billys, and (to coin a term) “spirit bears” are all part of the same tribe of Gay men Harry had engendered at the first radical faerie gathering convened in 1979.
Harry had an essentialist understanding of gay men–as having always existed. (“Essentialism” is a very bad thing in current Queer Theory thinking.) He understood us as a not-male-Hetero “third gender.” Our “third gender” defines us in terms of socially acquired roles and identities, not as a biological sex. (Here Harry anticipates today’s queer turn to socially constructed sex and gender identities.)
Harry conceived of us as a cultural minority, not merely a sexual minority where what we do in bed is the only thing that sets us apart. We are a tribe with a unique way of perceiving the world, having unique gifts for and responsibilities to society as a whole. All this, Harry said, are things Western Judeo-Christian religion successfully obliterated for 2000 years. Ours is a “collective sexuality,” replacing dialectics, the law of the unity and conflict of binary opposites, such as Hetero-females and Hetero-males.
Harry was a visionary whose radical faerie vision was of an international network of Gay men involved in spirituality and the grassroots politics of community- and consensus-building for broad social change. Indeed, Harry saw us as playing a integral role in society. Gay consciousness is a multidimensional consciousness not conveyable to “Hetero-male-evolved two-dimensional, or Binary, language.” Harry wedded together the political with the spiritual.
Faeries are not a “movement,” in Harry’s words, but a “development.” Our consciousness is “spiritual consciousness” and we “enjoy each other’s enjoyment.” Faerie space, and by extension, Billy space and spirit bear space, is spiritual space for our community of love and compassion, where we listen without judgement, share with each other in “great respect and affection.” In our space we embrace the goodness, rightness, and beauty of ourselves. We wrestle with “interpretive questions to be judged in terms of the ethics of the world we now live in.” We are Mediators between the seen and the unseen, the make-believe and the real, the Spirit and the flesh. We experience life with awe and wonder. Our sexuality is a gateway to Spirit.
Harry remained a radical to the end, never willing to accept how gay and lesbian history has been made to conform to a “neat closet-to-liberation, accommodationist-to-activist, homophile-to-gay model that ignores the radical roots of early the Mattachine society days.” He once wrote, “What passes for ‘theory’ today –clever essays in arcane terminology with the word ‘Queer’ in the title—rarely offers points of articulation with daily life struggles.” For me, Harry bridges the gap in my life between the world of academic thought experiments and the lived reality of my Gay life. After a long, circuitous path, I eventually found my way home to what I had been missing along the way—the spiritual dimension of my Gay existence and the existence of a Gay spiritual community. This is also the necessary ingredient I have found missing in assimilationist identity politics, middle-class materialist values of “success,” and academic theorizing. As the adage in 12-Step programs, where I had my spiritual awakening, puts it, “This is a million-dollar [spiritual] Program, and most people are willing to settle for nickels and dimes.”
Les K. Wright 