Dear Toby, letters to my gay nephew

I was too afraid, and probably at the time, didn’t have enough personally at stake to join ACT UP. In 1990 the Sixth International Conference on AIDS was going to be held in San Francisco. It was a huge event; the cases had begun to skyrocket, the death toll enormous, effective treatments few. San Francisco was one of the major epicenters of the outbreak. ACT UP had been founded by Larry Kramer in 1987 to push for more funding for research and treatment. In the face of the slow pace of development of the drug companies as well as their funding through the NIH, we knew that there were going to be massive protests and disruptions at the Conference. I remember that Rick Levine had a poster presentation about Maitri at the conference. I found it, tucked away in the tunnel that connected the hotels to Moscone Center. But Rick had convinced me that if I was to attend the conference, I should try to concentrate of seeing what therapies might be coming up that could be effective for "the

Swan's Oyster Depot and mother meeting the insane guy, what is his name, who knew me. LOL Emperor Norton “The first of these candidates was also the first to use costumes and/or gender blurring as part of his campaign. He ran under two names, Jesus Christ Satan and Crown Prince Arcadia. Jesus Christ Satan (born Robert Swallow) ran for supervisor in 1973 and in the voter's pamphlet listed his occupation as Androgynous Human Being. In discussing his qualifications for office, he said he held elected office as president of a hospital ward at Napa State Hospital.” Tommy and Dad were doing a lot of work on the upstairs at Julie and Tommy's house on King Street. I think that Katie was a toddler.

The father at Maylie’s house: My son came out to me.   I remember this afternoon well. It was a celebration for a Jean Courtney’s graduation from her social worker’s program. She had her certification, and finally after many years, had discovered a way to make a living. She was already working on team at Kaiser and had a steady incomer. Her many friends, mostly the Marin aging hippies and new age types had gathered for a lovely afternoon at Maylie Scott’s house on Ashby Avenue where we lived together. I introduced myself to a very nice man, about my age or perhaps a bit older. He had a company that designed houses with lots of prefab pieces that opened home ownership to new lower income group. He worked from home, with his family. They lived up in Camp Meeker near Saint Dorothy’s Rest where the zen group did extended retreats. His son had am older lover He said that this was a moment when he knew what he said would shape the future with his son Geo SeeberL: his dentist told

Men and boys are learning all kinds of trades but how to make men of themselves. They learn to make houses; but they are not so well housed, they are not so contented in their houses, as the woodchucks in their holes. What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? — If you cannot tolerate the planet that it is on? Grade the ground first. If a man believes and expects great things of himself, it makes no odds where you put him, or what you show him … he will be surrounded by grandeur. He is in the condition of a healthy and hungry man, who says to himself, — How sweet this crust is! Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/983997-henry-david-thoreau-what-is-the-use-of-a-house-if-you-havent-got-a-to/

Donny was a very straight acting man. Bill not so much. Actually Bill was very much on the fam side of the spectrum. A lot of what I am going to write might wind up on the cutting room floor as Bill's nephew is still alive and he was close. He’s also straight and I think, no I’m sure that this would be way way too much. But it is part of who Donny was so I am going to plunge ahead. It also comes under the category of it’s a small small world. When I was working for the Center for Aids Services in Oakland, we were looking for a consultant to work with us on a protocol. I was supposed to write the proposal.

November 26th, 2008 On the marquee of the Castro Theater where the movie Milk opened was the image of a political button: “Never Blend In.” I don’t remember if I ever heard Harvey say those words, but I do know that he embodied this unashamed openness about our gay lives. One of the reasons why many gay men didn’t much like him was that they truly believed that “blending in” was the only strategy that would allow them to lead the kind of lives they wanted for themselves. Professionally that was a perfectly valid choice, and one that I could have made, but one that didn’t seem like the right step. It seemed to validate the closeted rule of staying invisible. I could blend in. After many years of practice it seemed like second nature. And in a way I valued it. I could avoid a lot of the distasteful and dangerous situations that many effeminate men faced every day. I remember Orvis Bryant, whose business was designing showrooms and stores for the furniture business. He tried to straddle

Seeking after Truth This was to be the engine of my leaving the Jesuits, and I imagined my path to self-discovery. In the early fall of 1973, I had just found rooms in the faculty residence of the American Baptist Seminary of the West, enrolled as a special student at the Jesuit School of Theology Berkeley. I called Bob Ochs and he gave me a phone number. A rather deadpan voice told me to be at an address on Hearst Avenue at 7 PM on a Tuesday night for a meeting of Claudio Naranjo’s newest group of The Seekers after Truth. I think we were SAT 2. I always thought that the title was a bit presumptuous. Imagine a bunch of ragtag hippies, including dope smokers freely experimenting with all sorts of drugs, styling themselves after a group of disciplined Sufis who engage on an esoteric journey of self-examination in the name of the highest truth available to humankind. A far cry from the group Gurdjieff describes in "Meetings with Remarkable Men," but it was the name that Nara

I was an idiot, slow to learn. I was duped, seduced by the promise of an easy path. I also know that countless other people have jumped at what appeared to be the safety of a lifeboat when they were floundering and in pain. And if they’d managed to save a few bucks, there are always charlatans with a life jacket for sale. Rocky times are a normal place to begin a spiritual journey, and a good place to begin to write about that search. It is not easy to look back and feel no regret when I realize that I let a pearl slip through my fingers. At 77 I no longer have the prospect of a long leisurely life, no time to indulge in speculation or convoluted arguments. In Zen retreats they beat a big drum at the end of the day, and caution us to be alert and not let the moment slip away in delusion. I know how little time there is to waste. It was not entirely my bad luck that I met Bob Hoffman. What was seriously damaging is that I didn’t realize that I’d fallen hook line and sinker, and did not

The Cult of complaining (The cover for the grievance is the pablum The Love and Light crowd) “You can go back many times to the same place, and something strange happens if you go back often enough. You stop grieving for the past. You see that the past is something in your mind alone, that it doesn’t exist in real life. You trample on the past, you crush it. In the beginning it is like trampling on a garden. In the end you are just walking on ground.” (V.S. Naipaul, “A Bend in the River,” quoted by Aatish Taseer) My mother used to say that someday someone will come along and prove Freud wrong. But I know that you love to blame me. Of course she also knew that she had overstepped any reasonable limitations on the obligations of motherhood. I said I wouldn't do the 10 aphorisms learned from the Streets of the Castro. Complaining was once fashionable. There are some psychological mechanisms that need some release of emotion, or so we are told.

Bob Hoffman Grooms Me In cults, if things don’t go according to plan, you are to blame. In the sixth or seventh week of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy, I had a very uncomfortable experience. The beginning of Hoffman’s sexual abuse started in a setting that was allegedly therapy! Late one Wednesday afternoon I hand delivered my emotional “autobiography with father” to Hoffman on 15th Street. It was past 5, and the receptionist had left. Hoffman was sitting at his desk in a cramped office, with his feet on the desk. I stood in the open door. He told me to hand him my work, and he began to read it right on the spot. He would read a paragraph, comment on the emotional tone, and then try to make some connection between the specific circumstances I’d described and what he called the negative emotional patterns and character traits that I’d adopted from my father in an attempt to bargain for his love. Hoffman read through to an incident I wrote about my father resetting the stone wall at

June 19th 2022 Fathers’ Day Dear Toby, You are a grandson of the father I never really had. To be honest I was always overwhelmed that he was so loved by all his grandchildren, and jealous that he showered so much affection on everyone of you. You idolized him. I did not. I didn’t hate him though I thought that I had every right to. He was a very decent man to the core which became the source of guilt when I did feel some resentment towards him. And I did. Thankfully at the very end of his life, we both managed to break down some of the walls between us, at least slightly, and I could appreciate his tireless good humor, his persistence, his loyalty to his friends and his quick mind. When I was growing up, he remained almost entirely opaque. It was more than just that we didn’t know how to speak with one another or that I refused to speak to him. I tried, and I was the kid for god’s sake. We spoke different languages. And I think that he remained to some degree opaque to himself until i

Dear Toby, You have a gay uncle. I had one too, you met once or twice, your grandfather’s brother, Donny. I always knew he was gay, and so did my parents, but it was something that no one ever talked about. Before Stonewall no one talked about gay life in middle class society. Of course everyone knew that there were gay people out there, even relatives. It was just expected that you’d keep your mouth shut and not bring disgrace on the family. And that dynamic set up a very difficult barrier set up to being honest about most everything. I am not by nature a liar. Every time I opened my mouth I got myself in trouble. I am going to talk about a wide range of things. I will of course refer to specific people, times and places. I may not always recall all the facts exactly as they occurred. I am almost 80, and some details play the tricks that memory is prone to. Sometimes as with storytelling, I write for effect and, though I don’t want to play too loose with the facts, and I certainly don

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a molecule that encodes the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms For myself, I wonder if I really ever had what Kaiser calls the Jesuit DNA. After all, I left the Jesuits so, factually, there wasn’t the match I’d hoped for, genetic or otherwise. And I don’t hope to retrace my steps and discover a different outcome. I was not brought up in a very Catholic environment. I was baptized, and went through the normal religious milestones, at least as long as my grandmother, Edna Carroll, was alive. But the rebellious tradition of Irish anti-clericalism was alive and kicking on that side of the family. The only time my mother invited a priest into our house was to attend to Edna’s deathbed. My father’s family are entirely New England freethinkers, perhaps a reaction to their Puritan roots. So from two sets of chromosomes, the only overlap was Republicanism. When I decided to be a priest, the only option was

Yes and . . .  Dear James,  Your “ Best Read on Jesus and His Message ” was more than quick summation of the Jesus sayings, miracle stories, resurrection narratives, including possible source materials, how they were collected, and the way the early church used them, including the split between the Jerusalem vs the Greek/gentile communities. It is, from my understanding, pretty accurate. It might be a good jumping off point if we are just looking to examine the impact of what comes down to us, for both good and ill, of the “the Jesus Teaching.” I have to admit that it took me in another direction. Can I tell you that your Unitarian training is showing? Let me chime in from the more liturgical Catholic point of view, even though I am definitely a former Catholic with little affinity left for ritual observance of any kind, even the spare zen kind. I’ll call this “Going back to a year that might have changed my life.” This morning I find myself thinking about the year and half I spent at

A whiskey and a cigar!  23 years ago, and 38 years after I was JJ McLaughlin, S.J.’s beetle (beadle) at Fairfield Prep, “Father God” hosted a special celebration for the 200th episode of the TV sitcom Cheers (8 Nov. 1990). During that period of my life, I was probably watching from a bar stool nursing a whiskey. I remember being totally prepared to hate it, but actually, I really enjoyed his hosting. Afterwards I wrote him a congratulatory note which I closed with the observation that “The McLaughlin Group” might be better set at 84 Beacon Street with a few shots of whiskey -- or maybe the bar was open before the cameras rolled. He never responded. Being really honest, during that period of my life, fueled by booze, I had no intention of being friendly or gentlemanly. My memory is that his behaviors towards students were abusive (without the sexual connotation -- so perhaps unhinged is the proper technical term). And he pushed our extremely tolerant New England superiors to the breaki

Dear Toby, There’s an old saw: things work out for the best. I am not sure. The only thing that I’ll say with certainty is that things work out one way or another. A friend of Kumar’s decided to leave college one semester before completing his degree. It broke my heart and stirred up an old memory, and stirred a few hot coals under an old regret. At almost 80 years old I don’t have too many regrets in my life, but there is one thing that I wish I could do over. I went to the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I got in, I did the work. There were parts I loved, parts I struggled with, but for the most part I loved it. I was no good in the engineering structural part. But in my last year I decided that I wanted to do theology. I was convinced that it was the best decision for me. I dropped out of Graduate School Design. I finished the exams for the second to last semester. I told myself that I would return and finish the degree if I needed it. One thing led to another. I never went back,

A luxury hotel on the site of the US army base in Danang Vietnam. Good Russian vs. bad Russian "Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you." Anthony Bourdain I would like to talk about an uncomfortable truth regarding some of our Russian adversaries. But before I can write about that, let me fill in some details. There is something to travel writing I suppose although it has to get to be a bit more than simply creating word postcards. People who travel for more than checking off places on their bucket list do tend to change and increase their breadth of knowledge and experience. They are certainly more open minded. We lost the war in Vietnam which we never should have fought to begin with. We were also sold a bill of goods about the reasons for our involvement, which cost lives. I have no real idea what would have become of Vietnam wi

You’re right. I’m not exactly shocked, more surprised. I did not expect a letter from you, especially one so friendly. Thank you. I thought that we had both just decided to end any possibility of a relationship for whatever personal reasons. In the messy aftermath of mother and AJ’s deaths then dad’s going to live with John, I felt that we all got lost in blame and recriminations, punching and counter punching. I certainly don’t want to rehash that mess. We all did our best to keep it together while they were alive, but after they were gone, anchors adrift, all hell broke loose. I think that is especially true with regard to mother as she generated the strongest psychological pull. I forgot that I did that interview for the Dartmouth oral history project. I do remember that the interviewer was very skilled. He asked questions about things that I had pushed aside or relegated to the not important column. I’ll have to reread it myself. My actual assessment is that both our parents were j

Thanks for the mention of  "Obama's Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model." I am not going to mail 25 scarce bucks to Horowitz, or anyone for that matter, but it sent me back to my roots. During my “regency” I worked for a priest in Boston, Michael Groden, who was also a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in urban planning. Mike started a small office in Haymarket Square called the Planning Office for Urban Affairs. I wrote a proposal for the seed money from HUD for what became the East Boston Community Development Corporation which in turn became the first of many low income housing projects that Mike initiated. The impetus for Mike’s activism was his work with Saul Alinsky. Later I found out that our Morgan had been shaped by Alinsky’s training. I suspect I see evidence that John Baumann also exhibits some of these traits. So I have to thank the member who got my Irish going, and turned my mind back to my own Alinsky roots. I googled Mike, not easy as he

Dear Toby, I could just tell this story as if it were bumping into a very effeminate gay man on the street in the Casto. He just happened to be a Zen priest, and he invited me to join him in creating a hospice for people with HIV. Our meeting was in fact quite ordinary. During the first Zen Hospice Volunteer training. Issan had been invited to come to one of the sessions and answer our questions. I asked a question and he answered. I remember that my question was about all the things that were going on in my mind while I was trying to take care of the basic needs of Nancy Storm when she was dying. I knew that he was paying attention to me in a way that was quite profound, and I knew that I was going to work with him in some capacity., I could link it to my Jesuit roots. I could order the sequence of events as they actually happened. After 35 years, a chance meeting with a Zen priest who was starting a hospice for people with AIDS turned my attention back to meditation practice. It also

I live in a small town of 15,000 people, 8 or 9 thousand of them monks and nuns. There is a Thai monastery next to my flat. We have one Tibetan monk who is doing a completely isolated 3 plus year retreat in a house just down the hill, a house I rented for two years early on during my trips. The community knows he’s there and in subtle ways support his meditation. I’ve worked with a few lama friends on Buddhist projects. One is actually very interesting. Kunga Dakpa, a Nyingmapa khenpo and I are working on bi-lingual version of a very important Zen text, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. It has not been in Tibetan for almost a thousand years. I hope we are near the end. It’s been three years since we began. I live 200 meters from the residence of HH the Dalai Lama, but, as he no longer walks his dogs, I’ve only met him twice in 12 years. I do go to teachings and classes from time to time. I have very few western friends here, the closest is a young Mexican gay guy who just had

Dear Toby, I read in the news today a report about the widespread support in Russia for Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. By and large the ordinary Russian is thinking some variation of “if they fear us, they will respect us.” This ordinary Russian may or may not have had a hard time under communism or the various regimes that have held power since Gorbachov’s glasnost. There are now a whole generation of Russians for whom the great war, the siege of Moscow by Hitler towards the end of the second great war, is depicted in an almost mythological way in the authorized history telling. People with real memories have to be my age or older, and probably don’t talk about it. So we are left with this fear and anger driven rendition of history. I have some first hand experience of talking about mythology. Who were the winners and the losers? The people who survived and keep the emotional story alive. The same dynamic applies to stories about being bullied. It’s hard to even admit that I was bulli

Dear Toby I want to say a bit about "the gay cabal" in the Jesuits. In polite society we never talked about being gay. In the Church we never talked about sex. We never talked about HIV, yet just among men that I knew in Seminary. I was just reviewing the number of men who died before the advent of protease inhibitors. There are more than a few, and the cause of their deaths will remain hidden to the world. My late dear friend and former Jesuit, Frank Munns, once dared me to relate my experience with the “Jesuit Gay Lobby,” so in honor of Frank, here goes. I am sure that I will be treading into murky, and for some, yukky waters. I am also going to be talking in a general way about men whom you might know, or have known, or recognize, but as they say on TV crime shows, any allusion to real people or situations will be vigorously denied. I am going to allow myself to be more vulnerable here than in the pretty forceful way that I usually address the topic of sexuality and spirit