I received the sad news this morning that fellow Billy Philip Zimbardo has passed away. https://www.thebillys.org/memorials/philip-zimbardo/
Philip George Zimbardo (March 23, 1933 – October 14, 2024) was an American psychologist and a professor at Stanford University.[1] He became known for his 1971 Stanford prison experiment, which was later criticized severely for both ethical and scientific reasons. He authored various introductory psychology textbooks for college students, and other notable works, including The Lucifer Effect, The Time Paradox, and The Time Cure. He was also the initiator and president of the Heroic Imagination Project.
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil was written in response to his findings in the Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo believed that personality characteristics could play a role in how violent or submissive actions are manifested. In the book, Zimbardo says that humans cannot be defined as good or evil because we have the ability to act as both especially according to the situation. Examples include the events that occurred at the Abu Ghraib Detention Center, in which the defense team—including Gary Myers—argued that it was not the prison guards and interrogators that were at fault for the physical and mental abuse of detainees but the George W. Bush administration policies themselves.[25] According to Zimbardo, “Good people can be induced, seduced, and initiated into behaving in evil ways. They can also be led to act in irrational, stupid, self-destructive, antisocial, and mindless ways when they are immersed in ‘total situations’ that impact human nature in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual personality, of character, and of morality.” In The Journal of the American Medical Association, there are seven social processes that grease “the slippery slope of evil”:
• Mindlessly taking the first small step
• Dehumanization of others
• De-individuation of self (anonymity)
• Diffusion of personal responsibility
• Blind obedience to authority
• Uncritical conformity to group norms
• Passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference
The Billlys have been home for me and many of my heart-centered gay brothers. The Billys began In the 1980s in rural northern California in the midst of the AIDS epidemic.
In the first decades the Billys chose to not make our presence publicly known out of concern that the special bond we share would be dissolved. (As the Eagles put it, “Call a place paradise /kiss it goodbye.”) we relied on word-of-mouth, approaching individual men we thought might share our values and be seeking such community. This is how I found my way to the Billys in 2005.In recent years we have discovered our initial concerns were misplaced and now reach out openly and maintain a website. https://www.thebillys.org .
Who are the Billys?
The Billys is a heart-centered community woven together by shared values and by our shared experience as gay, bi, and queer men. We strive to be present and mindful with ourselves and each other as we gather four times a year in extraordinary rural venues in Northern California, and now in collaboratively created, rich online venues. Each gathering is a work of art, carefully crafted by Billys to take us to places of joy and playfulness, intimacy and openness, creativity and self-expression. We embrace everyone with deep welcome and radical acceptance.
What are our values?
Heart Circle is our central ritual and consensus is our process; they embody our values. Ongoing Heart Circles keep us connected and in community in online events through the current pandemic. We encourage ourselves to be present and mindful by advocating an environment free of drugs and alcohol at our gatherings. We envision the creation of a world based on principles of nonviolence, sustainability, cooperation, service, and the building of deeper wisdom through shared perspective.
I have found that every Billy is a remarkable man, each in his own way. Numerous famous gay men have been members.
We maintain a scholarship fund named after early Billy member Richard Holt Locke (June 11, 1941 – September 25, 1996). He was an American actor in gay erotic films of the 1970s and 1980s, who went on to become an AIDS educator and activist.
Locke’s age, musculature, dark hair, and hirsute frame have been credited with contributing to the popularity of “macho gay male” imagery in gay adult cinema and culture of the 1980s and 1990s. He is also regarded as having been an integral part of a highly developed star system in gay adult films, with a filmography and physique that d define the parameters of gay adult film. He is best remembered for his role in El Paso Wrecking Company (director Joe Gage [pseudonym of Tim Kincaid]).
Locke used his name and celebrity to make personal appearances at “sensible sex” seminars around the country, advocating for safer sex practices in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, and New York. As one of the reasons for starting his “sensible sex” seminars and performances, he stated that “everybody loves a daddy, so if I can serve in that capacity to transmit information about good, clean, healthy sex, then I am more than happy to play that role.”
Also around 1983, Locke became a regular visitor to Ward 5B, the first inpatient AIDS ward in the country, in San Francisco General Hospital. He entertained patients, served brunch, and gave massages to people with AIDS. This holistic therapeutic model towards HIV positive patients, put into use by practitioners and entertainers such as Locke, Rita Rockett, and Annie Sprinkle, was known as the San Francisco model of AIDS care. Locke, along with his care work for HIV positive patients, can be seen in clips from the documentary film 5B (Dan Kraussand Paul Haggis, 2018; fellow Billy Ed Wolf also appears in 5B). As part of his care work, would routinely travel to Mexico for HIV drugs and distribute them in an underground clinic in Sacramento.
Les K. Wright 