Though Don’s shortcomings (to put it mildly) are oft-discussed in this group, his email blast today seems directly applicable to discussions around our own Club, and how (and even why) we can make it effective as an activist group. I take away a couple of key items:
I noticed a “pendulum” between liberationist and assimilationist activism, which I didn’t really know. I thought there was really only one swing, which Don puts at around 1985. What this suggests to me is that there is a possibility for a pendulum swing back to a more liberationist stance.
The history is useful, and I was unaware. Much of it happens in Los Angeles!
Here’s the quote that struck me, because the question is, “What next?”
“Scarcity comes from intellectual analysis and spiritual consciousness with organized feet-on-the-ground leading LGBTQ people forward, crucially remembering, it always starts with an organized few, not tens of thousands. I hopefully scan the queer horizon carefully searching for signs of such a critical revival and participatory movement, but first the queer generation needs to honestly and courageously ask itself, “How am I oppressed as a queer person today?” Everything depends on the answer to that question. Action grows out of oppression. Otherwise, complacency and collaboration with the current LGBTQ Neo-Homophile status quo and elite capture will continue to rule. Or, as William Faulkner succinctly put it in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.””
First, I like the reminder that “it always starts with an organized few”. That could be us! But his plaintive
“I hopefully scan the queer horizon carefully searching for signs of such a critical revival and participatory movement, but first the queer generation needs to honestly and courageously ask itself, “How am I oppressed as a queer person today?””
strikes me as so (unsurprisingly) un-psychological. We have worked for years on our own internal and psychological oppression, and I think we’re much clearer than many assimilationist organizations on how that psychological oppression is worse than ever. It’s likely we will lose ground on our assimilationist accomplishments in the next ten years, and such an occurrence could make our work more relevant again, perhaps precipitating a pendulum swing back to liberationist priorities.
I can imagine saying to Don, “No lack of courage in our community, Don, though you hate it, fight it, and lack the courage yourself to engage with us and our work.” And unlike Don, Uranian Psychology actually offers a framework for combatting that oppression both in our community and others.
Lastly, the email below reminds me that there just aren’t any serious solutions to be found beyond working in an engaged, gay, and brave way with our own psyches in order to advance our human and homosexual personhood.
Any thoughts from you guys in response? I’m certain I’ve missed things (I’m literally simultaneously on a conference call with a four-star general, a former Director of Cybersecurity under Obama, and Karl Rove—all hosted by Goldman Sachs--talking about China’s threats and actions [military and cyber] and potential policy under Trump)…quite a difference from the email I’m trying to write!!! This is synchronous with some recent conversations in our group, and so symbolic of the very “pendulum” I’m mentioning above between assimilation (Jason on a GS call with a general, Karl Rove, and a Counterterrorism expert) and liberation (Jason thinking about the history of our movement, about oppression, and about psychological activism as the cure to the sorrows of our world).
In gay spirit,
Jason Oclary
Don is only interested in actions he helped organize. Anything else he ignores or willfully writes out of history. It is factually a lie.
He ends the militant Gay liberationist period in 1985. In fact, there was a dialectical battle between militants and assimilationists as far back as 1970 when activists who did not want to confront racism, sexism or capitalism split from the GLF. I think they were called the GAA and they had some reasonable objections to the GLF. For instance, not enough focus on strictly Gay issues.
But the most militant period of Gay Liberationist Politics started in 1987 with the founding of ACT UP Los Angeles, a group Don never participated in. This organization continued for ten years and involved women, people of color and coalitions with other groups. It involved thousands of arrests and taught the mainstream movement how to militantly organize.
And Treeroots continues to grow as a grassroots Gay Liberation focused on group organizing. Don eventually left Treeroots. At the same time groups as the LGBT Center that Don helped create became more assimilationist oriented. Both streams of organizing existed throughout this time as they had since 1970.
He also completely ignores the AB101 riots in L.A. in 1991 that lasted over a week and were the most sustained LGBT civil disobedience acts in the history of the planet.
Why did Don not notice any of this? Because he did not lead these groups. He was missing in action the greatest Gay protests of his life.
Also he did not consider ACT UP to be Gay because it worked with straight women and others from outside the Gay movement.
But ACT UP founders like Mark Kastopoulos and Peter Cashman came out of the militant leftist group, The Lavender and Red Union. ACT UP had assimilationists but was dominated by and run by militants who risked their lives and safety to protect thousands of Gay men from being decimated.
Don's "history" makes me want to puke. It is one thing to ignore people, it is another to willfully write them out of history, the way Don obliterates the AB101 riots, AIDS activists and Mitch Walker.
This is violent, murderous, historical assassination. The man is a monster.
~Wendell Jones
This article was written by very long-time gay activist, Don Kilhefner, who now mostly writes a newsletter on esoteric gay history, mostly L.A.-centric.
I was quite involved with him for years, beginning when he, Mitch Walker, and Harry Hay cofounded the Radical Faeries in 1979 (when I met Mitch). He was deeply influenced by Mitch's psychological focus, so much so that he quit the faeries with Mitch to cofound Treeroots (Treeroots.org), the organization that to this day sponsors the Gay-Centered Inner Work Club that I facilitate each month, and he became a "Jungian" psychologist as a result.
But he became disgruntled because he refused to be open about his issues with us organizers and resigned in the mid 90s after 15 years as a director and board member. He's since publicly behaved as if he was never involved with us, has erased Mitch's central involvement in the cofounding of the Radical Faeries in his public statements, and from what I've seen never addresses psychological matters, particularly as they apply to political organizing, which is Treeroots' principle concern. ~Chris Kilbourne posted on my Facebook page