The Boy in the Yellow Dress

falling apart

2010-02-04T12:57:00.002+11:00

After a recent spate of minor catatrophes I have felt like I am 'falling apart' at the seams. So what else is new!

I've often said that sustained spiritual practice is like 'unraveling the knitting', as in: my mind keeps stitching me back together with its constant story telling, and the practice keeps undoing all that, to dip me back into ... what? the void? No-thing? That place where, having found it, I can let go utterly of me? hence, unraveling.

But that process can shake you down to your roots sometimes (I suppose that goes without saying, eh?) I suppose there are noble antecedents to this alternative to keeping it all together, then.

Thanks to Mitch Ditkoff for this lovely reminer from the Chinese sage, Lao-Tsu:

I am a fool, oh yes, I am confused.
Other men are clear and bright.
But I alone am dim and weak.
Other men are sharp and clever,
But I alone am dull and stupid.
Oh, I drift like the waves of the sea,
Without direction, like the restless wind.

Hands together now...

2009-10-16T09:37:00.004+11:00

The re-union of opposites

2009-10-16T08:44:00.001+11:00

If it is somehow inappropriate for me to welcome the emergence of the South African intersex athlete as a wild card disturbing the cosy social and political divisions of gender (which a large number of people seem to require for their ontological security), I must return to the iconography available in the Hindu figure of Ardhanisvara, who is the presiding deity of this blogspot, as an archetype that adroitly manages to reconcile the opposites.

In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald,

“The true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time.”

If a force is introduced with the intention to divide what is whole, creating separation and division, it also produces a counterforce, which is the desire for reunion.

I draw your attention to the lovely gesture of greeting used by people in certain Eastern traditions, who press the palms of the hands together – the right and the left meeting equally, with the head bowed – when meeting one another. The bow of the head acknowledges that, beyond the division of self and other, you and me, right and left, male and female, there is an over-arching (or underlying) principle of unity that can contain and resolve the apparent separation.

An apology and an explanation

2009-10-16T06:58:00.005+11:00

Several people were offended by my posting about the case of the South African athlete. Once again I would like to thank those people who took the trouble to post comments and correct my various misapprehensions. In some cases I feel the anger and hostility were misguided, but that is something that they would have to deal with within themselves and I would not presume to offer any advice.

Insofar as the displeasure stems from a mistake that I am willing to acknowledge, here is what I think my root error was in this posting: to the extent that I was appropriating the experience of this young athlete, whom I do not know, I strayed from authenticity, which can only be based on my own experience, so I unreservedly apologise for that.

But to understand the meaning of my own experience, over many decades now, my understanding has been, unavoidably, also based on observation of phenomena outside myself. Many factors feed into the process of intelligent inquiry, and one learns to recognise and interpret useful information from others' experience, surely, as contributing to that inquiry? However, if one appropriates that experience without incorporating others' feedback, then one blunders, and even age, I am afraid, doesn't protect one from making mistakes.

To come back to my own experience, then, I wonder if you have understood the thread that informs this blogspot. You would be mistaken if you assumed that I am defending or proposing some LGBQT agenda. That has not been my intention, and if you were to presume that is the case, unfortunately, that would put you in the invidious position of ‘othering’ me.

So, if I am not permitted to observe and comment on the disturbance that this event involving Caster Semenya – or, rather, the media construction of Caster Semenya – produces, let me offer what I have understood from my own experience.

I am male, but I have nipples. Is this some flaw in the design? Should I be ashamed that as a man, not only do I have nipples, but that as an ageing man, those nipples now sit on breast tissue that has increased with age?

When I read about the stage of differentiation that produces this either/or bifurcation in the growing foetus, my natural curiosity is concerned with knowing more about the primary state that precedes the split. If biology doesn’t help me in de-coding the meaning of that fascinating (to my mind) possibility, perhaps the Tao Te Ching, of Lao Tse, might. If I remember correctly, he says something like: 'From the nothing comes the one; from the one comes the two; from the two come the thousand forms.'

So, believe it or not, in my personal contemplation of my condition, I have pondered deep and long about the 'one' that preceded the two (and later, how that very one emerges from 'the nothing', and what the qualities of that 'nothing' might be.) The urge to remember union (Carl Jung calls that the 'Unio mystica', if I remember correctly; I think of it more simply as ‘the urge to merge’) can be acted out in the world of relationships as if I am looking for the lost part of self that split off (vide Plato’s famous, if idiosyncratic model). If so, I won’t be happy until I find the partner that completes me.

On the other hand, I might try to recuperate the lost parts of self within my own psyche. If you understand that journey, you might recognise that this young athlete (whose pain I cannot presume to know) represents an icon for recovery for me.

In the incident with the yellow dress, which I recovered from memory only as I started to write my memoir with that name, I recalled something of a natural state of unity.

To enter the world of gender ('boys don’t DO that!') was to lose the easy access to a state of unity that preceded what was for me the painful division of gender. If the state of undifferentiated union was the primary reality, gender was a secondary development, and sexuality a very distant THIRD state.

My history as a sissy boy, then a queer man, has not been about 'sexual preference'; please don’t presume that to be the case. Something deeper was driving me, to recover nothing less than the state of unity. If you don’t understand why, let me give you an analogy: I can’t imagine how a house could be built without a ground floor; trying to construct a dwelling with only a second and third floor would be inherently unstable, wouldn’t it; dangerously so, in fact.

I feel that is the case within the psyche (not for everyone, just in my own personal recovery work; I don’t want to universalise a personal revelation – one that I would urge you to respect as hard won and tested – but it does work symbolically in my personal mythopoesis).

To use ‘ground’, as part of the phrase ‘ground floor’, is significant for me. Paul Tillich, the existential Christian theologian, spoke of the Absolute Ground of Being. Perhaps he was drawing from the ancient Vedic principle of Param Brahman, or even the Tao: the great formless field of consciousness/energy that contains all forms (including little me, with all his personal worries and anxieties!)

I have found, over several decades of practice, that certain techniques of introspection, taught to me by an eminently qualified practitioner who had mastered the practice, have helped me to bring the alienated, separate personal ‘me’ self into alignment with the all-embracing field of unity, and a huge feeling of relief has been the gradual result of that re-union (or ‘yoga’) for me.

The healing has not come through sex, nor political struggle, nor religion (as it is conventionally understood), nor psychology, but by recovering the lost aspect of being that was abandoned as I was forced into the world of duality (‘eating the fruit of the tree of Knowledge of good and evil’, perhaps).

In any case, that re-alignment process – which has not come about overnight – has settled the second and third stories back in contact with the ground floor. That has been a major shift at the root of being, and to the extent that it has been achieved, a huge source of healing; psychologically, ontologically and spiritually. Whew!

I will try to explain that process, and the benefits that accrue, to anyone who sincerely wants to know, but I do not need to seek a stamp of approval from any institution or individual; it is my own private victory.

However, I do like to acknowledge and thank the generous and kind assistance that has come to my aid throughout those many years, in the guise of certain people and certain experiences (both hard and gentle!). Most of all, I acknowledge with the deepest gratitude my guru; my spiritual guide and, in effect, ‘life coach’. Without his intervention when I needed it most, and his continuing guidance, encouragement and support, I would have lost my life and all the opportunities it affords.

So it is that – rather than pushing some ill-conceived rationale for whatever agendas you might have imagined and projected into my comments – that is the deeper context for my comments. If, in commenting on the events surrounding this successful athlete, I have caused offence, I apologise.

Joy for all.

Beyond doctrines, direct perception

2009-10-15T22:03:00.001+11:00

So stay here, you lucky people,
Let go and be happy in the natural state.
Let your complicated life and everyday confusion alone
And out of quietude, doing nothing, watch the nature of mind.
This piece of advice is from the bottom of my heart:
Fully engage in contemplation and understanding is born;
Cherish non-attachment and delusion dissolves;
And forming no agenda at all, reality dawns.
Whatever occurs, whatever it may be, that itself is the key,
And without stopping it or nourishing it, in an even flow,
Freely resting, surrendering to ultimate contemplation,
In naked pristine purity we reach consummation.

- Longchenpa, (a 14th century Tibetan master) Treasury of Natural Perfection

Intersex athlete blurs the rigid male/female dichotomy

2009-09-24T11:04:00.009+10:00

At the recent world athletics championships in Berlin (August 2009), 18 year old South African athlete Caster Semenya won the women's 800 metre event by a clear margin (though not in world record time). Doubts were expressed about Caster's status as a female, based on her appearance, and tests have revealed that unusual anatomical features place her as an "intersex", or "hermaphrodite", rather than a true woman..

A developmental biologist from the University of Queensland, interviewed for the Sydney Morning Herald, explained that:

“Early in development within the womb, the gender of a foetus is indistinguishable, determined at between 16 and 20 weeks gestation by the presence of an XX chromosome for a female or XY for a male. The foetal gonads, which have the ability to develop into ovaries or testes, then develop, producing hormones which form external genitalia. But if the foetus has a malformation on the sex chromosomes, such as XXY, or XYY, the gonads can send out mixed messages, causing a female to develop a penis or a male to form a clitoris." ("Testing times for intersex athletes" SMH Sept 12 - 13, News, p. 5)

Koopman stated that one in 400 babies is born with both male and female reproductive organs.

If the baby develops with external female genitalia, but internal male gonads (testes), the presence of greater levels of testosterone produces a 'masculinised' skeleton and muscles, even while the genital appearance might present a vagina for external appearance.

Most intersex babies are born with genital ambiguity and are assigned male sex at birth (presumably, the clitoris is taken as a penis in such cases). But the extra rush of hormones at puberty sometimes produces secondary sex characteristics that confuse the assignation. Many are found to have a uterus and develop breasts at puberty and about half show evidence of ovulation. Caster's situation appears to have been the opposite.

No detailed descriptions of Caster's physical characteristics have been published in the press, but her ambiguous physiology has, once again, disturbed the rigid polarity that divides the sexes neatly in two and caused much consternation, not only for her family (and the South African sports official who knew the results of testing before the event) but for sports journalists and ethicists who seem to need clear divisions rather than a continuum. Gender is more fluid than we are permitted to acknowledge, usually, but the stability of the entire moral universe requires these poles remain separate and distinct so that Otherness continues to divide us, rendering the opposites forever unreconcilable and unintegrated.

I welcome Caster Semanya's perhaps unintentional contribution to public discourse on these matters and hope that s/he doesn't suffer too much for her striking physical testimony.

Note that, BEFORE there is a separation into male and female, there is unity. Living East of Eden, as we do, according to the ancient myth, we need reminders that once upon a time beyond time we knew no separation. It is more than possible (some would say it is imperative) that we could recover wholeness by learning to integrate these polarities within out own psyche (even if our bodies have been assigned to one pole or the other) and reject the dominance of difference.

Oh, for a peaceful passing

2009-02-11T11:04:00.002+11:00

My sister's partner died at home last week.

I called Judith my 'sister-in-love', as they were not permitted to marry by the perverse laws of a society that doesn't recognise love, only convention. Even if the 'Law' is incapable of recognising loving unions, we are learning to make a family, consciously, out of the web of loving relationships we weave for ourselves and each other. So much support has been flowing in over the past week; this vibrant woman brought joy to so many lives and her passing has generated much good will.

My sister and I were lucky to be with her at the time of her passing. Although she left very quickly, in a sense, as we sat with her over the ensuing hours we were intuitively drawn into deep meditation and inspired to practise some gentle 'healing' arts to soothe her and help her accept the shutdown of her physical systems.

It seems that it takes time for the soul that is moving on to extricate itself from its longstanding association with the physical form it grew to transport itself through this stage of its journeying. Naturally, we get very attached (!) to the body, and fall into identifying with it as ourselves. So 'death' can be a shock to the 'normal' state of affairs; sometimes people panic as they realise they can no longer get it working; so, to die in an atmosphere of peace and acceptance, feeling the 'rightness' of the process, and allowing it to unfold, naturally, is a great blessing.

Alas, on the other hand, the terrible bushfires in the South (mostly Victoria, at the moment) have meant that many people there have died in a mood of panic and desperation, rather than a cocoon of safety and calm.

I hope that even as a flow of material support - money, clothing, food and blood - goes towards the survivors, a parallel flow of love and healing energy goes towards those whose passing was so traumatic.

Progress?

2009-01-23T10:53:00.005+11:00

My support for the new U.S. President was undermined when Obama persisted with using Rev. Rick Warren to deliver the invocation, during Tuesday's Presidential inauguration, in spite of Warren's anti-gay record and his support for Proposition 8, banning gay marriage in California, equating relations between gays to acts such as incest... This guy is an influential religious leader!
Doesn't Obama realise how many gays and lesbians worked for his election?
And by invoking the name of Jesus, rather than a generic 'God', how included would all the Jews, Muslims and Buddhists have felt?
A lot of hegemonic majoritarian ignorance in play... Hegemony: the dominator influence - as of a state, region, or group - over another or others.
See Wikipedia definition of hegemony:
"a concept that has been used to describe and explain the dominance of one social group over another, such that the ruling group or 'hegemon' acquires some degree of consent from the subordinate, as opposed to dominance purely by force. It is used broadly to mean any kind of dominance, and narrowly to refer to specifically cultural and non-military dominance..."

"Examples are: the use of institutions to formalize power, the employment of a bureaucracy to make power seem abstract (and, therefore, not attached to any one individual), the inculcation of the populace in the ideals of the hegemonic group through education, advertising, publication, etc., and the mobilization of a police force as well as military personnel to subdue opposition."

This from Daniel Chandler's notes on the term (at the Aberyswyth University, Wales, website:
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism10.html)

Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci used the term "to denote the predominance of one social class over others; not only political and economic control, but also the ability of the dominant class to project its own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it accept it as 'common sense' and 'natural'.
To succeed, this involves willing and active consent.
'Common sense', suggests Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, is 'the way a subordinate class lives its subordination' (cited in Alvarado & Boyd-Barrett 1992: 51)."
Hence, although I am not a Marxist, my position is not to just roll over and allow these shit-for-brains leaders to control the terms of public discourse. I'm old-fashioned. I protest!

There are those who thank the Prez. for including the invite gay Episcopalian Bishop V. Gene Robinson to articipate. Where I come from, that's called 'having two bob each way', a metaphor from the betting ring. A less sympathetic reading would use something like, he's fond of 'running with the hares and hunting with the hounds...'

Pope found guilty of queer bashing

2008-12-23T15:48:00.005+11:00

Pope wants humanity 'saved' from homosexuality
Reuters report, 23 December 2008

[Photo caption: The Pope is greeted in Sydney by World Youth Day co-ordinator Bishop Anthony Fisher (L) and Cardinal George Pell. Photo: AFP]

Pope Benedict XVI says saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour is just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.

"(The Church) should also protect man from the destruction of himself. A sort of ecology of man is needed," the pontiff said in a holiday address to the Curia, the Vatican's central administration.

"The tropical forests do deserve our protection. But man, as a creature, does not deserve any less."

The Catholic Church teaches that while homosexuality is not sinful, homosexual acts are.

It opposes gay marriage and, in October, a leading Vatican official called homosexuality "a deviation, an irregularity, a wound".

The pope said humanity needed to "listen to the language of creation" to understand the intended roles of man and woman.

He compared behaviour beyond traditional heterosexual relations as "a destruction of God's work". He also defended the Church's right to "speak of human nature as man and woman, and ask that this order of creation be respected".

- Reuters

Comment:
Pope Benedict speaks of ‘saving humanity’ and of the duty of the church ‘to protect man from the destruction of himself’, when in fact the vast majority of mankind has already recognised that it is this man - and the cruel and perverse teachings of his increasingly irrelevant church - that we need to be protected from. (If he were to follow his own logic, should he not himself have been breeding all this time, instead of bothering us with his misguided morality-for-others?)

If Ratzinger/Benedict were to really ‘listen to the language of creation’, as he advises, he would have noticed, along with the biologists, that so-called ‘homosexual’ acts have been observed occurring right across the ‘natural’ world, among literally THOUSANDS of species, that in fact, such acts are normal variations of sexual behaviour. (See Bagemihl, Bruce. Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999); (see Bagemihl, Bruce. Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999).

What kind of ‘human nature’ is this man referring to? And when, exactly, did the radical Jesus become co-opted as an apologist for normative bourgeois sexual morality?

The abstract for the AAR conference

2008-11-13T13:16:00.001+11:00

"Religious Resources in Resignifications of Queer Identity: The Case of Christopher Isherwood, 'homosexualist' and disobedient subject."

For British critics, Christopher Isherwood went off the literary radar when he declared himself a pacifist and de-camped to California on the eve of WWII. Nothing he wrote after the "Berlin Stories" (1939), when his life was barely half over, until "Christopher and His Kind", in 1976, when he emerged as a kind of gay literary icon, was accorded much serious attention from Britain’s literary establishment.

Furthermore, what he published during his long relationship with a guru in the Ramakrishna Vedanta tradition, which culminated in the classic "My Guru and His Disciple" (1980, published when he was 75), has scarcely been taken seriously, and few literary critics have detected the influence of Vedanta in his later work (e.g. Nagarajan 1972). Yet there have been calls for Isherwood to be re-evaluated as a serious religious writer (Wade 2001).

If such calls are to be taken seriously there are several issues that need to be addressed, not the least of which would be the dominant cultural expectations surrounding the (im)possibility of a spirituality not predicated on the denial of (a non-conformist) sexuality. "My personal approach to Vedanta was, among other things, the approach of a homosexual looking for a religion which will accept him", he wrote in 1970. This panel will interrogate several of the issues contributing to the occlusion of his religious life and writing.

In addition to the pathologizing discourse of psychological medicine that promulgated a construction of "homosexuality" as developmental failure, for example, there is also the problem of an unreconstructed colonialist prejudice towards religious practices associated with a subject people. For a lapsed Anglican atheist and former socialist to take on a guru and investigate Vedanta was unacceptable in 1939, and contributed to the feeling in Britain that he was, once again, "letting down the side". For his best friend, W.H. Auden, all this "heathen mumbo jumbo" was really beyond the pale. Isherwood was seeking out not only a rationale for his new-found pacifism, but a differently ordered array of "technologies of the self" than those provided by the Anglicanism of his upbringing. In Vedanta he found useful transformational tools among an otherwise "subjugated knowledge" system (to borrow Foucault’s terminology) that allowed him to move beyond the boundaries of his culturally ordained subject positioning.

His persistence with the practices of the Ramakrishna Vedanta tradition while continuing as an unrepentant "homosexualist" (Savage, 1979), is an instance of what Judith Butler would describe as a moment "in which the subject exceeds the terms that constitute him/her", a staging of "unforeseen and unsanctioned modes of identity" (Salih, 10).

The panel will address the role of auto/biographical praxis in resignifications of "queer" identity, drawing not only on Butler, but also on feminist theorists of life writing such as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (1996), who say that in specific situations, people may "choose not to narrate the stories that are prescribed for them", opting instead to "reframe the present by bringing it into a new alignment of meaning with the past" (12). Writing autobiographically becomes a resistant strategy for re-narrativizing the self, an assertive recontextualization that recovers meaning from the toxic narratives buried within hostile discourses. The "subject" changes place — from being a product of a discourse of subjugation into an assertive agent of self-signification. (One panelist will trace the roots of the genre of "queer spiritual autobiography" back to Whitman and Carpenter in the 19th Century.)

The panel will analyze how his investigation and embrace of Vedanta philosophy and practice confronts the standard views of what is possible for a "gay" man to know. For, by withholding from non-conformists the possibility of an engagement with "the divine", certain strands within conventional Western religious discourse produce what Foucault calls "regimes of truth" — power/knowledge relations that constitute "a set of rules by which truth is produced". In his personal search and his textual interrogation of notions of what constitutes a "self", Isherwood produced versions of subjective identification that disrupted authorized views of masculinity, and confronted the exclusivist modeling of the religious life as it was framed discursively within his own historical and cultural context. One panelist will interrogate modernist constructions common to the period, including the notion that “the homosexual” subject was an identity understood to signify developmental “failure”, in order to mark its difference from a presumably fully-developed, mature “heterosexual” being.

The discussion will draw upon Peter Berger's analysis of the functioning of "plausibility structures" in the sociology of knowledge systems, and the mechanisms by which different sources of knowledge and information are accorded "differential plausibility", with "deviant" views marginalized or excluded. "The threat to the social definitions of reality" writes Berger, with Thomas Luckmann, is neutralized by "assigning an inferior ontological status, and thereby a not-to-be-taken seriously cognitive status, to all definitions existing outside the symbolic universe" (Berger & Luckmann 1966, 133). One panelist will address the prejudicial dichotomizing which casts Western religious practice within a reified "rationalist" discourse, opposed to Hindu beliefs and practices which it characterizes as "superstitious".

Isherwood was inclined less to approach ideas as abstract principles and more as they were embodied in particular people. In Swami Prabhavananda, an exponent of the Ramakrishna Vedanta tradition, Isherwood found a life-long guide, and the narrative of his spiritual journey is the history of a relationship that deepened over forty years. That bond, and the non-dualist elements of Advaita Vedanta that made it a hospitable environment for a former atheist and all-round dissident to explore his spirituality, will be another focus of this discussion.

Chicago conference

2008-11-13T13:09:00.002+11:00

The reason I was in Chicago on election day was that I had organised a panel discussion at a big academic conference, the annual meeting of the American Academy of religion, the largest gathering of religious studies scholars in the world. I had been encouraged by a nun from the Ramakrishna Order, who knew Isherwood, to propose a panel discussing Isherwood's neglected spiritual writings, and over a period of some 10 months, pulled together contributors from London (Katherine Bucknell, editor of the Isherwood Diaries - 3rd and final volume almost complete), New York (Jamie Carr, a young PhD whose splendid thesis was imemdiately picked up by Routledge), a scholar from Italy (Mario Faraone), and the nun, Pravrajika Vrajaprana. The panel was presided over by Dr james Berg, who has published three edited volumes of essays on Isherwood and collections of Isherwood pieces.

As a result of this initiative I have been approached by a professor of religion from Barnard College, at Columbia University, to guest edit a special issue of her journal and I have asked James Berg to work with me on that. The name of her journal is: 'Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds', an interdisciplinary journal published by Equinox Publishers (UK).

She made this offer on the strength of the blurb I wrote for the AAR conference program... I'll publish that in a separate post...

Cover art coup!

2008-11-13T13:04:00.002+11:00

While in L.A., I took the chance to meet up with Don Bachardy again. Don was Christopher Isherwood's life partner, and is a famous portrait artist. My interview with him was published in White Crane in 2006. Don has kindly provided a portrait of Isherwood for cover art for my forthcoming book on Isherwood, tentatively titled 'Mr Isherwood Changes Trains' (a reference to his famous Berlin novel, 'Mr Norris Changes Trains').
Apart from the Melbourne publisher (Clouds of Magellan) I met with the editorial chief of White Crane while In New York and he is looking at the manuscript now (it's still in rough draft form, after being re-worked so it reads less like a PhD thesis...)

U.S. election coverage

2008-11-13T12:56:00.002+11:00

What's left of my article (they cut it by about 1/3rd) on the US election (I was in Chicago on election day)
is at the Byron Echo's online site: www.echo.net.au

but you have to search for it. The heading is American spirit rekindled by a true leader

The full web address is:
http://www.echo.net.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1255&Itemid=543

The Echo is my local newspaper in Byron Bay, New South Wales

Coming back through LA last Friday night, I was picked up at the airport by a couple I have known for 20 years; they married 6 weeks ago, after 26 years together (longer than most 'straight' couples I know)! Imagine how pissed they are about Prop 8... However, as we returned to their house in Long Beach, they mentioned that a demo had been going on for several hours. As soon as we got to their house, we were drawn out by a cluster of helicopters hovering a few blocks away. So we marched down the street for a few blocks, made a left and voila! we were in a large demo, police with full riot gear and so on, informing us (on a tape loop through amplifiers on the back of a truck) that if we didn't disperse immediately we would be arrested! The recorded message ("in the name of the people of California" no less!) was drowned out for at least an hour by constant rounds of chanting.

It was so exhilarating, after being in Chicago on election day itself, to land back in California and be able to join in that protest. It took me back to the days of the anti-war marches against the stupid involvement in Vietnam, and I was chuffed to see my brothers (and sisters) not laying down and taking it anymore. I remembered the feisty spirit of the drag queens in New York, who started the riots at the famous Stonewall Inn and kicked off a revolution...

As for the success of the nasty Prop 8; as many people pointed out over there, the huge turnout of voters, esp. black voters, many of whom are churchgoers, meant that their conservative 'Christian' values came with them.

The surprise is that Gov Arnold Schwartzenegger (spelling?), who originally said that marriage was between a man and a woman, expressed disappointment that the prop. actually passed, encouraged gays to take it to the courts (that is happening now) and said if they wanted to pick up a lesson from body building, to never give up!

Arnie does have a Democrat wife (former newswoman and member of the Kennedy/Shriver clan), but I wonder what his belated opinion is worth: he's standing for re-election in less than 2 years and I am sure he would want the gay vote!

election night, from Chicago/New York

2008-11-05T13:22:00.003+11:00

9 pm Tuesday 4th, live from New York
I was at a conference in Chicago and today travelled from Chicago to New York.
Ensconced in cosy apartment on the swank upper West side, Manhattan, watching blanket election coverage as the votes roll in, and laughing at the media's irrepressible need to be AHEAD of the news... In spite of their gruesome blunder in 2004, when at this stage of the voting were calling the election for Kerry... and we all know who won then! They can't stop themselves - NBC one of the worst offenders, still calling 'results' from notoriously unreliable exit polling, taken from interviews with people as they exit the polling booths.
Coming through the States via Los Angeles, last week, it was impossible to ignore the mood of anticipation, undercut by fear and trepidation. Could it be possible that this well-educated, calm, 'mixed race' candidate, with the knack of inspiring people to hope for change, could actually displace the monstrous Cheney/Bush push.
We all watched in dismay as the idiot leaders squandered the sympathy and goodwill flowing towards the US after September 11, and regressed the most powerful gorilla in the tribe into big grunt warrior chest beating idiocy. Crikey! what a mess they have plunged us all into.
I sometimes wonder if this is what it was like when homo sapiens began to emerge as a new evolutionary force... They must have had to share the planet with whatever preceded them; a long period of overlap, no? Was it: cro-Magnon man??? My paleoanthropology is not a strong point. Homo sapiens had to outsmart the drongoes, even while it had to share food and territory. Do you think we can evolve our way into a new way of being in the world?

Isherwood book may have found a publisher!

2008-07-08T17:31:00.005+10:00

July 4th - Independence Day
(and the anniversary of my arrival, in 1989, to take up residence in the U.S., the land of my maternal grandparents; in effect, my very own Independence Day; independence, that is, from the unconscious acceptance of the ruling metanarratives of the compulsory Australian masculinist stereotypes that had gnawed away at me - homophobia institutionalised and adumbrated right through the culture and dutifully internalized by me.)

Today I received news from a (tiny) publisher in Melbourne, that they are interested in to publish a version of the thesis I wrote that got me the PhD at the University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia. The thesis developed a new theory for a positive construction of queer spirituality, using Christopher Isherwood as my case study. I read Isherwood an early exemplar of a writer - and unapologetic homosexual - who stepped outside the hegemony of the Christian imaginary to seek out tools for growth from an alternative tradition; namely, Ramakrishna Vedanta.

Isherwood left Europe, along with his pal, the poet W.H. Auden, on the eve of WWII. While Auden stayed in New York, Isherwood travelled West, to seek out Aldous Huxley and other expatriates, including the polymath Gerald Heard, to garner intellectual support his newly-proclaimed pacifism. But Huxley had become a student of a Swami in the Ramakrishna Order and was 'making japam' (doing meditation practice, using a mantra and beads).

As a former socialist and conscientious objector to the stuffy Anglicanism of his upbringing, Isherwood had rejected God as a kind of capitalist uber-Boss, so he was initially suspicious of anything remotely 'religious'. Heard and the Swami (Prabhavanada) presented meditation as an empirical practice, not requiring supernatural beliefs and Isherwood found the Swami's attitude to sexuality refreshingly different from the sin-based moralising he associated with the forms of Christianity with which he had become familiar.

Isherwood arrived in Southern California in 1939 and for more than 40 years combined a life writing for the Hollywood studios, hanging out with the stars, screwing around AND getting to know the Swami - as a friend and spiritual guide - and himself, through the meditation practice. He wrote influential tracts on Vedanta that attracted many in the West to the practices, and published translations, with his guru, of key Vedanta texts. He also wrote an 'official' biography of Sri Ramakrishna himself (under the watchful eye of the monks from the Headquarters of the movement in Calcutta), Ramakrishna and His Disciples, but the later autobiographical account of his time as a student of Swami Prabhavananda, My Guru and His Disciple (1980), based on diaries he kept throughout the decades, is a straightforward account of a very human relationship, free of the idealized hagiographies you might expect in the genre of Church texts recounting the The Lives of the Saints for the faithful.

Perhaps it's not surprising that much of this work from the second half of his life has been relatively ignored, especially in Britain, where the lingering resentment towards his pacifist stance, combined with the snotty pseudo-Christian prejudice towards a notorious 'homosexualist', ruled out of the religious life by conventional religious discourse, continues, in some quarters, even today.

If Isherwood first came to fame as a chronicler of the rise of the Nazis (he lived in Berlin in the 1930s), resulting in the famous Berlin Stories that eventually became Cabaret, by way of a stage play (I Am a Camera), there was a second wave of interest in his writing with the publication of Christopher and His Kind (and Down There on a Visit) in the 1970s. His writing - even the so-called novels - is largely autobiographical, and two volumes of his Diaries have been published under the editorship of Katherine Bucknell (who is working on the third and final volume as you read this). But one of his most influential books is the novella A Single Man. These later texts brought him new prominence as an influential mentor and icon during the rise of gay liberation.

But it is this third wave of interest, in Isherwood's religious life and writings, that is bringing renewed attention. For here was a man who managed to combine a sincere and sustained practice of spirituality with his dharma as a writer, the busy life of the studios, and a passionate engagement with the life of the body.

His sensible presentation of Vedanta principles created a bridge for many men (and women) who sought an alternative to the exclusivist Christian imaginary. Yet his embrace of Vedanta, as the religion of a colonized peoples, continues to confront unresolved colonialist prejudice, just as his marriage of the life of the body and the life of the 'spirit' confronts lop-sided notions of the religious life. Added to this was his partnership with Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior, a relationship that raised eyebrows in many quarters. A documentary of this relationship: Chris and Don, A Love Story, has just been launched in the U.S.

Don is famous in his own right as a portrait artist, still working in his seventies. (My interview with DB was published in White Crane newsletter in 2006 (available online, via the White Crane website.)

So, as queer intelligence seeks out pathways for growth in a post-secular age, Isherwood may still have a lot to teach. This is the context of the book that has been accepted by the Australian publisher: Clouds of Magellan.

Wish me luck!

Ardhanisvara

2008-06-26T17:22:00.003+10:00

This poster art image, as well as the statue at the head of this blog, are representations of an Indian deity known as 'Ardhanisvara', who displays features of both genders. As Ardhanishvara, Shiva is androgynous: i.e., half male, half female and yet at the same time one god. Shiva Ardhanisvara is another of Shiva's manifestations in which the symbolism of Tantric opposites is represented as the perfect union of the two primordial principles, Shiva and Parvati (his 'consort'). Note, the figure has one male breast and one female one, and at the figure's feet are two different animal mounts: Shiva's bull and Parvati's lion.

Avalokiteshvara (and Kuan Yin)

2008-06-26T12:10:00.007+10:00

Images of this archetypal figure have moved me in recent years.
'Avalokiteshvara', also known as 'Chenrezig' in Tibetan Buddhism, is sometimes shown with one thousand arms. He is the Bodhisattva of compassion, and is said to be acutely sensitive to the suffering of the world.

Kuan Yin (known as Kannon in Japan) is a Mahayana manifestation of the same compassionate figure (in my opinion) and provides an intercessionary exception for the sometimes austere Buddhist precept: Save yourself! This image of Kuan Yin (quite unlike many others) is shown with the many arms you often come across in representations of Avalokiteshvara and Chenrezig...

Beginning at the beginning

2008-06-26T09:54:00.000+10:00

One week after my birthday I received news that I had been awarded a mentorship, through the Australian Society of Authors, that would enable me to work with an editor on the manuscript of my memoir The Boy in the Yellow Dress.
I chose an editor as mentor, as the ms was tottering under the weight of 150,000 words! (Most publishers would shrink at the prospect of such a loooong book.) With so much material already 'on the page' as it were, I knew I needed the assistance of an experienced critical eye to decide what to keep and what to discard.
I met Shelly Kenigsberg at LAST year's Byron Writers' Festival and wanted to find a way to finance her professional contribution. Luckily for me, the ASA offers a number of mentorships each year (from 350 applicants, 20 were selected) and a group of writers act as a judging panel to assess the samples sent in to them.
So, now it's time to get serious. Some teaching work lined up for semester two has fallen through, opening up the time to put in some serious work on the ms. (One door closes, another one opens.) Okay, there will be no income, but sometimes time itself is more important than money...