Does gay spirit equal gay pride?

By Michael Kearns

“The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.”
—playwright Oscar Wilde

I deftly aim the camera to capture the ostentatious rings that adorn Oscar Wilde's fingers: a manifestation of the artist's gay spirit. Gay pride and gay spirit are neighbors in secret places of the soul, tied together by durable heartstrings.

I am in Ireland for the Dublin Gay Theater Festival where Jimmy Shaw is resurrecting James Carroll Pickett's solo work, Dream Man. Jimmy, his lover Sergio and I are paying our respects to the vivid statue of Wilde in Merrion Square.

Transporting an American gay play that shimmers with the lush sensibilities of Tennessee Williams to rehearse in Madrid, a city afire with the enigmatic echoes of Federico Garcia Lorca, to ultimately be performed in the Ireland of Wilde's sophistication and panache, provides a panoramic portrait of gay spirit.

At a cozy restaurant, a stone's throw away from the Wilde monument, Spanish-born Sergio, an actor with Almodóvar leading-man good looks, makes claim to his “own religion” in spite of being indoctrinated as a Catholic. He sees gay spirit as “triumphing over being different.” The theater, he asserts, is “a sacred place” where the “special sensibility of being both gay and an artist is reflected with a strong impulse.”

While gay spirit can be expressed in many fabulous forms—from political demonstrations to 12-step meetings, on canvas and on the page—it is the theater that provides the catalyst for many of us to bask in our gay spirituality.

Christian is a 23-year-old lad with dark auburn hair and alabaster skin, living in Dublin, with “a passion for the theater.” Like Sergio, he says he doesn't “need an organized religion” in order to connect to something larger than himself. “Spirit is energy; the energy that transpires between the audience and the performers creates a situation you can't experience anywhere else.

“Spirit is about believing. Believing what transpires on the stage results in a type of energy that connects us. Spirituality and creativity are linked.”

Andrew, also in his twenties, is a towering dandified Englishman who could—based on his incisive intellect and unapologetic flamboyance—accurately be compared to Wilde. “Gay spirit,” he says, “is my ability to accept myself and thus be able to go forward as a fully-rounded individual.

“I fight for myself as a young gay man, and respect previous generations who fought for my rights, obviously, but I will not join any herd just because it is suggested. Before anything else, I am a human, surrounded by other humans.

“When I think of gay spirit, I am influenced by Virginia Woolf´s Orlando and Gore Vidal´s seclusion,” the gangly book critic says. “One must first understand that gender is nothing, and anti-social behavior the best way to achieve peace and quiet, to then understand that gay spirit is unnecessary, unless you are stuck and scared without your social identity.”

West Hollywood-based Don Kilhefner, a Jungian psychologist and shamanic practitioner, is a founding father of the American gay liberation movement. Along with Harry Hay, he created the Radical Faeries in 1979 to expressly explore questions of gay consciousness and gay spirit. “Evolutionary biology,” Kilhefner says, “tells us that a trait is not passed on from species to species unless that trait is contributing to the survival of that species. We're talking about us as a human species.

“As early as there have been written records—say 5,000 years—we have been present,” he says. “What is it that we, as gay people, are doing that makes us so integral to our survival as a species? What's our role?

“Many times we can't see it. And others can't see it because we're caught in the myth of the homosexuality that defines as a sexual act. That's the trap we're caught in. Our oppressors have defined us as sexual beings and, as a result, we can be controlled—as long as we play the homosexual model.

“A blow job is a blow job,” Kilhefner pointedly states. And chuckles. “I don't think the reason we keep appearing is because we're giving blow jobs. What is the essence of who we are as gay people?”

When it appeared in 1987, Mark Thompson's Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning gave voice to an entire generation of gay men who dared to seek alternative visions about the ineluctable questions facing their lives.

“Gay spirit,” Thompson asserts, “can be seen as a mediating cultural force: As a constant change agent whose genesis—and genius—springs from the fusion of opposites which then creates new social possibilities. Or, more personally, as a tangled bramble of questions, feelings and instincts rooted at the base of the soul. One must be on a seeker's path lined with inquiry about the self and its relation to others before answers or articulation of any real significance is achieved, however.”

As gay men, routinely shunned by organized religion, we create entryways that explore spirit outside of church walls. Sergio says that he “tries to practice what Jesus taught but not in the way that the church has interpreted it.”

Andrew concurs by impugning the collegial hypocrisy: “Modern religion is an organized and corrupt body presided over by moneyed individuals with little or no idea of what I believe to be spirituality. The Christian church makes me sick and I have no time for it.

“Spirituality is my inner belief in myself, my inner belief in beauty, my inner understanding of death. This is, actually, quite a Christian ideal. I think Jesus, if he existed, would probably have been an all right guy. But that is a misnomer, as Jesus has become a white man with a halo, as opposed to a dusky Jew with a penchant for hippies.”

Thompson, a fiftysomething Silver Lake denizen, paints an overview of our gay evolution that is cautionary. “While ever a target of political fascists and religious conservatives (so what's new?), as a self-defined minority group we have seen much progress in realizing certain material gains in recent decades. This is not a bad thing. But the false sense of comfort which is all too easily assumed in a you-are-what-you-can-buy consumerist culture does dull the senses. In contrast to strengthening our resolve to move on to higher moral ground, finding our 'place at the table' may actually be diminishing us.”

“The terrible cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever. This is what comes of a Protestant morality, that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving.”
—playwright Federico Garcia Lorca

“Everything about the theater is spiritual,” Sergio contends. “The spirit of the actors, the spirit of the audience, the spirit of the play." As I watched Shaw perform Pickett's immortal words in Dream Man, I was delivered into satiety, bathed in the blazing glow of gay spirituality. My artistic partner who died of AIDS, the actor who I've entrusted with a role that was written for me, the demonstrative Irish audience and I were fused by a palpable, galvanic force that was as prideful as it was spiritual.

I have always insisted that to be an artist in the theater is to be of service to a purpose larger than oneself: the opposite of the misperception that all artists are narcissists. Kilhefner references the work of Edward O. Wilson (On Human Nature), a writer whose research suggests that gay people carry “an altruistic impulse” that extends “beyond our own self-interest.”

The dictionary defines “altruistic” as “pertaining to behavior by an animal that may be to its disadvantage but that benefits others of its kind.” Consider the radically theatrical, and often perilously dangerous, artistic contributions of our forefathers (Williams, Lorca, and Wilde among them) as well as impassioned outpourings from our brethren of more recent generations (the Cockettes, ACT UP, and Robert Chesley).

“All good art is an indiscretion.”
—playwright Tennessee Williams

“We are Eros-charged spiritual seekers by nature,” Thompson concludes. “Either we are awake or on the wrong bus. And the latter is nothing more or less than a prettily decorated ride to self-erasure. Gay spirit is eternal. But we mortals are here and gone in a flash. Asking the questions ‘Who are we? Where do we come from? What are we here for?’ and acting in accordance with the answers and intuitions which inevitably follow will truthfully define our rightful place and purpose in the world.”

Michael Kearns can be reached through his Web site, www.michaelkearns.net.