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Also on this website:
Toby
Johnson's books:
THE FOURTH QUILL, a novel about attitudinal healing and the problem of evil
TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the
Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of
Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness
GAY PERSPECTIVE:
Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe
SECRET
MATTER: updated, revised & expanded edtion from Lethe Press
with Afterword by Mark Jordan
GETTING
LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE
PLAGUE:
A NOVEL ABOUT HEALING.
CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into
Gold: Reclaiming Our Queer Spirituality Through Story
About ordering
Books on Gay Spirituality:
Articles
and Excerpts:
Read
Toby's review of Samuel Avery's The
Dimensional Structure of
Consciousness
Funny
Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San
Francisco"
The
Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate
A Bifurcation of Gay Spirituality
Why gay people should NOT Marry
Wedding Cake Liberation
Gay Marriage in Texas
What's ironic
Shame on the American People
The "highest form of love"
The
cause of homosexuality
The origins of homophobia
Q&A about Jungian ideas in gay consciousness
What is homosexuality?
What
is Gay Spirituality?
My three messages
What Jesus said about Gay
Rights
Queering religion
The purpose of homosexuality
Interview on the Nature of
Homosexuality
What the Bible Says about
Homosexuality
Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men
Varieties
of Gay Spirituality
Waves
of Gay Liberation Activity
Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality
as Artistic Medium
Easton Mountain Retreat Center
Andrew Harvey &
Spiritual Activism
"It's Always About You"
The myth of the
Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara
Joseph Campbell's description of
Avalokiteshvara
You're
Not A Wave
What is Enlightenment?
What is reincarnation?
Emptiness & Religious Ideas
Experiencing experiencing experiencing
Going into the Light
Meditations for a Funeral
Meditation Practice
The way to get to heaven
Advice to Travelers to India
& Nepal
Nate Berkus is a bodhisattva
John Boswell was Immanuel Kant
Curious
Bodies
What
Toby Johnson Believes
The Joseph Campbell Connection
Campbell & The Pre/Trans Fallacy
The Nature of Religion
What's true about Religion
Being
Gay is a Blessing
Freedom
of Religion
The
Gay Agenda
Gay
Saintliness
Gay Spiritual Functions
The subtle workings of the spirit in gay men's lives.
The Sinfulness of
Homosexuality
Proposal
for a study of gay nondualism
Priestly Sexuality
Marian Doctrines: Immaculate Conception & Assumption
"The Evolution of Gay Identity"
"St. John of the
Cross &
the
Dark Night of the Soul."
Avalokiteshvara at the Baths.
Eckhart's Eye
Let Me Tell You a Secret
Religious Articulations of the
Secret
The Collective Unconscious
Driving as Spiritual Practice
Meditation
Historicity
as Myth
Pilgrimage
No Stealing
Next
Step in Evolution
The New Myth
Gaia is a Bodhisattva
Teenage
Prostitution and the Nature of Evil
Allah
Hu: "God is present here"
Adam
and Steve
The Life is in the Blood
Gay
retirement and the "freelance monastery"
Seeing with Different Eyes
What
are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?
The
mystical
experience at the Servites' Castle in Riverside
The
Great Dance according to C.S.Lewis
The Techniques Of The World Saviors
Part 1: Brer Rabbit and the
Tar-Baby
Part 2: The
Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
Part 3: Jesus
and the Resurrection
Part 4: A
Course in Miracles
The
Secret of the Clear Light
Understanding the Clear Light
Mobius
Strip
Finding Your
Tiger Face
How Gay
Souls Get Reincarnated
About Alien Abduction
In honor of Sir Arthur C Clarke
Karellen was a homosexual
The
D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance
More
about Gay Mental Health
Psych
Tech Training
The
Rainbow Flag
Ideas for gay mythic stories
Toby's friend
and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.
Harry Hay, Founder of the gay movement
About Hay and The New Myth
About Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first man to really "come out"
About
Michael Talbot, gay mystic
About Guy Mannheimer
About Dennis Paddie
About Arthur Evans
About Christopher Larkin
About Sterling Houston
About Michael Stevens
Our friend Tom Nash
Second March on
Washington
|
D.A.F.O.D.I.L.
The D.A.F.O.D.I.L.
Alliance was the organization of lesbian and gay mental health workers
at The Tenderloin Clinic in downtown San Francisco that lobbied to get
the Gay Mental Health Task Force established.
The acronym stood for Dykes and Faggots
Organized to Defeat Institutionalized Liberalism. We obviously loved
the reference to the flower, daffodil. We were a group of slightly
wiser and older flower children, a daffodil alliance indeed.
Gay mental health
workers complained that
we were hired for a "gay-specific clinic" but then were given so many
chronic psychiatric cases we didn't have time to see the gay clients.
So "institutionalized liberalism" meant the institution would claim to
be gay-sensitive, but in fact didn't give a hoot about gay people's
real issues.
(Ah, where's any kind of liberalism
today?)
Part of the story
of the DAFODIL Alliance was that its first action was a
march/demonstration that started at the Tenderloin Mental Health Clinic
in the old YMCA building on Golden Gate Street off Market and marched
to City Hall and then to the offices of the community mental health
services that funded our agency. We got a Lesbian Brass Marching Band
to lead the demonstration.
It attracted so much attention that a
HUGE crowd formed and followed us down the street. When this throng
arrived at the mental health offices the openly gay but professionally
discreet Director, Dr. Bill Goldman,
climbed out and stood on a balcony outside his office window and agreed
to give us everything we wanted. (Which was $60,000 for our clinic and
a job in the Health Dept for a black lesbian mother named Pat
Norman who was then working as a paraprofessional at the City's mental
health unit called The Center for Special Problems--who has since
become a major S.F. politician and social
servant.)
Dr. Goldman also set up a Gay Mental Task
Force to study and make recommendations for implementation of gay
sensitive policies in the City's mental health services. The Task Force
recommendations resulted in the adoption of a Gay Client's Bill of
Rights, guaranteeing access to gay or gay-sensitive health care
providers--a notion that, subsequently, had major effects in
AIDS-related services.
For another two years, DAFODIL "oversaw"
the implementation of the gay mental health task force recommendations.
The irony of it all was that after that first demonstration, DAFODIL
literally fell apart (we were all so P.C. we couldn't stand each
other), but four of us kept meeting and sending official sounding
letters. So by giving the illusion we were some sort of large and
powerful group, we influenced city government significantly, but there
were really only four people: two dykes and two faggots.
Mervyn Silverman who later became
director of
AmFAR and buddies with Liz Taylor replaced Goldman as supervisor of
community mental
health soon after his predecessor gave us all our demands. So it was
mainly Silverman we pulled the wool over the eyes of.
But with good
benefits all around!
The
"backstory" --from Toby Johnson's perspective--of how The
Tenderloin Clinic and San Francisco's gays-for-gays policy evolved out
of early gay liberation activism.
One of the major characters in The
D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance was S.F. lesbian psychotherapist Phern Hunt.
Phern has a blog at huntkassoff.blogspot.com
Phern comments about
D.A.F.O.D.I.L., "But the most important point
was made through Dafodil, and that is that out gay therapists,
heretofore, only held their positions as individuals... what we
demanded was gay-identified mental health services... and of course we
won. Dafodil was like a gay therapists union in those days."
The original
members of D.A.F.O.D.I.L. were: Ricki Boden, Phern Hunt, JoAnn Lovejoy,
Carol Hastie, Mavis DeWees, myself (Toby Johnson), Rachel Wahba, Karin Wandrei, Becky Sharp, Reuven Closter,
Daniel Ostrow,
Nancy Feinstein, Karen Cagan, Maggie Hochfelder, Marge, Loon, Taj
Tellalian, Russ Zellers, Larry Goldfarb, Sue Saperstein, Joanie Becker,
Jeff Moulton. (back)
Among the original staff at The Tenderloin Clinic were: Connie Arburua,
R.N., Michael Lipp, MSW, Jerry Polon MSW, (eventual long
term director of Tenderloin Clinic), David Brandt, PhD (not gay) and
Fred Phillips, MD., Carol Hastie, MSW.
BACK to Toby's home
page
BACK to the page about Toby
and Toby
|
