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Also on this website:
Toby
Johnson's books:
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 edition from Lethe Press
with Afterword by Mark Jordan
GETTING
LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE: A romance novel set in the 1980s and the 1890s.
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
CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into
Gold: Reclaiming Our Queer Spirituality Through Story
PLAGUE:
A NOVEL ABOUT HEALING.
About ordering
Books on Gay Spirituality:
White
Crane Gay Spirituality Series
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
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"
Second March on
Washington
A
Bifurcation of Gay Spirituality
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
Common Experiences Unique to Gay
Men
Is there a "uniquely gay
perspective"?
The purpose of homosexuality
The Reincarnation of Edward
Carpenter
The Gay Succession
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
The
Gay
Spirituality Summit in May 2004 and
the "Statement of Spirituality"
"It's Always About You"
The myth of the
Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara
Joseph Campbell's description of
Avalokiteshvara
Avalokiteshvara at the Baths.
You're
Not A Wave
What is Enlightenment?
What is reincarnation?
How many lifetimes in an ego?
Emptiness & Religious Ideas
Experiencing experiencing experiencing
Going into the Light
Meditations for a Funeral
Meditation Practice
The way to get to heaven
Buddha's father was right
Advice to Travelers to India
& Nepal
The Danda Nata
& goddess Kalika
Nate Berkus is a bodhisattva
John Boswell was Immanuel Kant
The Two Loves
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
Drawing Long Straws
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
"The Evolution of Gay Identity"
"St. John of the
Cross &
the
Dark Night of the Soul."
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
The Moulting of the Holy Ghost
Gaia
is a Bodhisattva
The Hero's Journey as archetype
Marian Doctrines:
Immaculate Conception & Assumption
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
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
In honor of Sir Arthur C Clarke
Karellen was a homosexual
About Alien Abduction
What
are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?
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
Kip and Toby,
Activists
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 Fr. Bernard Lynch
About Richard Baltzell
About Guy Mannheimer
About David Weyrauch
About Dennis Paddie
About Ask the Fire
About Arthur Evans
About Christopher Larkin
About Sterling Houston
About Michael Stevens
Our friend Tom Nash
Book
Reviews
Be Done on Earth
by Howard E. Cook
Pay Me What I'm Worth by
Souldancer
The Way Out by Christopher
L Nutter
The Gay Disciple by John Henson
Art That Dares by Kittredge Cherry
Coming Out, Coming Home by Kennth
A. Burr
Extinguishing
the Light by B. Alan Bourgeois
Over Coffee: A conversation For Gay
Partnership & Conservative Faith by D.a. Thompson
Dark Knowledge by
Kenneth Low
Janet Planet by Eleanor
Lerman
The
Kairos by Paul E. Hartman
Wrestling
with Jesus by D.K.Maylor
Kali Rising by Rudolph
Ballentine
The
Missing Myth by Gilles Herrada
The
Secret of the Second Coming by Howard E. Cook
The Scar Letters: A Novel
by Richard Alther
The
Future is Queer by Labonte & Schimel
Missing Mary
by Charlene Spretnak
Gay
Spirituality 101 by Joe Perez
Cut Hand: A
Nineteeth Century Love Story on the American Frontier by Mark Wildyr
Radiomen
by Eleanor Lerman
Nights at
Rizzoli by Felice Picano
The Key
to Unlocking the Closet Door by Chelsea Griffo
The Door of the
Heart by Diana Finfrock Farrar
Occam’s Razor
by David Duncan
Grace
and Demion by Mel White
Gay Men and The New Way Forward by Raymond L.
Rigoglioso
The
Dimensional Stucture of Consciousness by Samuel Avery
The
Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love by Perry Brass
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Revolution through Consciousness Change
From
my understanding of the event (based on my working with Toby Marotta on
the book The Politics of Homosexuality which included an
elaborate
account of Stonewall), what "empowered" the patrons at the Stonewall
Inn was a general hippie/countercultural rejection of societal power
structures (arising from the anti-war movement) AND, importantly, from
a sense of numbers.
I think -- and I don't
claim to be right, only to have an opinion -- what happened is that
earlier that the day, Friday, June 27th, 1969, a great
many men from
the Village flocked to Judy Garland's funeral at a upper Eastside
funeral parlor at Madison Ave and 81st. What impressed them -- and in
the early hours of the next day, mobilized them to resist the police
raid on the Stonewall Inn -- wasn't Garland's divahood (after all, it
had been her downfall), but rather the number of other gay men they saw
at the event. These were Garland's fans. There were crowds of
homosexuals recognizing each other on the street in front of the
funeral parlor.
Garland's funeral turned
out to be a sort of proto-gay pride event. And it demonstrated
there
was power in numbers -- that was something "in the air" in those days
as one anti-war mobilization after another demonstrated how many people
were "anti-establishment."
The
Stonewall Inn was a sort of hippie bar. The "street queens" weren't
politicos and they weren't "drag queens" in the sense of female
impersonators or drag performers. (The bar was not particularly
welcoming to true drag queens/female impersonators and, in fact, had a
quota on the number the bouncer allowed in.) They were hippies in
so-called "gender fuck drag." And they were likely high on pot or
tripping on acid.

The Stonewall Inn, in
fact, had been under attack by the fledging gay politicos of the time.
About a year and a half earlier, Craig Rodwell (previous President of
the Mattachine Society New York and founder of the Oscar Wilde Memorial
Bookshop) had written an article for a MSNY newsletter called The
Hymnal tracing a rash of Hepatitis A infections to the bar. It was
believed by the proto-actvists with the Mattachine that the bar didn't
wash glasses between uses. This lack of concern for the patrons'
well-being was attributed to the bar's Mafia ownership.
As time has passed, the
mythology of Stonewall has come to valorize drag queens as the
champions of political and cultural revolution. That's probably missing
the point that it was the anti-Establishment tenor of the times, hippie
nonchalance and joie de vivre, gay men's sense of being outsiders, and,
very importantly, the drugs -- and then the sense of numbers and power
observed at Garland's funeral -- that gave the crowd around the
Stonewall
Inn the impulse to resist the police that night. And inadvertently to
initiate the transformation of how gay people see themselves that is
the gay rights movement!
This was
liberation through consciousness change. And that is our queer
contribution to the effort of human consciousness to understand how to
transform itself and save the future.
Read about URSA and the Hustler
Study
Read about The D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance
Veteran Gay Activist extraordinaire Jim Fouratt presented a statement
about Stonewall and the street demonstrations that followed the
original night of resistance to police at a June 23, 2015 meeting of
the Landmarks Preservation Committee.
Here's the text:

THE MESSAGE OF STONEWALL
by Jim Fouratt
I am glad to hear that finally there is a discussion of landmarking
locations in Greenwich Village that were a part of the beginning of the
struggle for equality and equal treatment under the law of all same sex
loving people. History was changed that Saturday night in June
beginning at 10:30 PM in front of 51-53 Christopher St, when a police
officer took a manish looking woman out of the Stonewall Inn and placed
her in his police vehicle and went back inside. A small crowd had
gathered. She managed to free herself to cheers and in that moment the
modern Lesbian and Gay movement was born.
We who were actually there that first night and the three that followed
know what really happened and why. I was present all four nights.
Stonewall was not a riot. It was a spontaneous rebellion against
oppression ignited on Christopher St, in front of a Mafia bar. The
Stonewall Inn to me is a symbol of oppression and exploitation by
organized crime with the complicity of the New York City Police
Department. Every bar in 1969 in the Village that served homosexuals or
lesbians operated under this same relationship.
The Stonewall Rebellion ignited the repressed desire for freedom and
visibility that is buried deep in every lesbian and gay man. A desire
to integrate our erotic desire with physical expression and the
integration of our full humanity and personhood in an expression of
love.
I welcome the land marking of the building at of 51-53 Christopher St.
and the street in front of it. What changed history was not what
happened inside the bar but what happened outside on the street. No
need to landmark a private business once a gay bar then a bagel shop,
now again a bar, and who knows what private business in the future. It
's not the building that historically important, it's the location not
the business.
Much of what happened that night has been distorted to read like a 60's
political watershed. It was and it was not. It was gay, it was queer
and that is a significant difference in how people behaved. Police and
hospital records do not support calling it riot. It was a spontaneous
rebellion that night and over the next three night which was quietly
directed by a small group of gay men who, unlike most of lesbian and
gay participants, had been involved in the anti-Vietnam war and draft
movement and were experienced at street politics.
Please teach history not as myth but as reality. Landmark the street
location where history was made not a bar that served and exploited us.

Jim Fouratt
227 Waverly Place
Greenwich Village NYC Ny MusicAwards
Stonewall Rebellion participant all four nights
Founding member of the first post-Stonewall political group The Gay
Liberation Front
CoFounder Wipe Out Aids /Heal 1982
Founding Board Member of the New York City Lesbian and Gay Community
Services Center
Founding Member ACT-UP
C-Founder Lesbian and Gay Male Circle
Here's a link about Jim Fouratt -- http://reviews-and-ramblings.dreamwidth.org/tag/activist:+jim+fouratt
Jim Fouratt is second from right in this
photo
About the movie Stonewall (2015)
Michael Bedwell has written a good article about
controversies surrounding the 2015 movie directed by Robert
Emmerich--though not a review of the movie, since he had not yet seen
it.
His description of the crowd accords with what I learned from Toby Marotta (as I
assisted him editing his magnus opus and brilliant political analysis
of themes in the homosexual rights movement, The Politics of
Homosexuality) and with what I have learned from Jim Fouratt. The
instigator of the Stonewall Rebellion was a butch lesbian.
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2015 13:24:02 -0400
Subject: Re: Stonewall, the movie!
While I've yet to see the movie as it's not yet playing close enough to
me, I expect I will still feel the same way after having seen it. That
is, that the central problem is not the film but the psychopaths who
have stampeded so many into hating it for reasons that have NOTHING to
do with the actual facts of Stonewall but what they WANT people to
believe. Thus, I doubt the objectivity of most reviews, and think they
decided to dislike it unseen, and looked for reasons to justify that
when they saw it. The "review" in "Vanity Fair" was a clusterfuck of
such histrionic, misinformed dishonesty. For now, this is my take:
THE RIOT OF LIES OUTSIDE THE [MOVIE] STONEWALL. When deciding whether
to see Roland Emmerich's new film, and how to evaluate it if you do,
remember what Walt Whitman wrote: "the historian, if not a liar
himself, is largely at the mercy of liars." So, too, filmmakers as the
calls for Emmerich's crucifixion along the Hollywood Walk of Shame for
creating what some would have us believe is the celluloid equivalent of
AIDS keep mounting.
The rioters in 2015 claim that the movie "whitewashes" and
"transwashes" what actually happened; that portraying a white (eeew)
"cisgender" male from Indiana at the center of the protagonists in 1969
is an insult because all the actual protagonists were people of color
and/or trans. But after hundreds of interviews, David Carter, whose
2004 book gay historian Eric Marcus describes as the most "definitive
and comprehensive," concluded that, emphasis mine:
"My research for this history demonstrates that if we wish to name the
group most responsible for the success of the riots, it is the young,
homeless homosexuals, and, contrary to the usual characterizations of
those on the rebellion’s front lines, MOST WERE CAUCASIAN; few were
Latino; ALMOST NONE WERE TRANSVESTITES OR TRANSSEXUALS; most were
effeminate; and A FAIR NUMBER CAME FROM MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILIES. It is
remarkable—and no doubt inevitable given human psychology—that in the
popular imagination THE NUMBER OF TRANSVESTITES AT THE RIOTS IS ALWAYS
EXAGGERATED."
Stonewall veteran and "Philadelphia Gay News" publisher Mark Segal
wrote: “If you want to know the facts rather than fiction, read David
Carter's book." To be fair, Segal later panned the film after seeing it
but primarily for reasons which centered upon his belief that it did
not adequately portray GLF which is entirely different from the issues
I address here, and from what Carter's book is about. Segal's
references to Sylvia Rivera in his review are curious for reasons
explained below.
Carter also concludes from his research that, IF there was one person
most responsible for triggering the riot, it was either a
sometime-hustler white male with a hot temper called Jackie Hormona or
a never identified white "stone butch" lesbian who was being abused by
the police.
CARTER: >>>There is no doubt that, furious for whatever
reason, she put up a fight. [*One witness said], "She was giving them
their money's worth," and remembers that there were three or four
policemen on her. She fought them all the way from the Stonewall Inn's
entrance to the back door of a waiting police car. Once inside the car,
she slid back out and battled the police all the way to the Stonewall
Inn's entrance.
An unknown woman who recorded the scene in a letter emphasized the
lesbian's fury: "Everything went along fairly peacefully until . . . a
dyke . . . lost her mind in the streets of the West Village—kicking,
cursing, screaming, and fighting." But after she reached the Stonewall
the police pulled her back to the police car and again placed her
inside it. She got out again and tried to walk away. This time an
officer picked her up and heaved her inside. [*He] estimates that the
struggle between the police and the lesbian lasted between five and ten
minutes. According to yet another account, at around this time a
woman—possibly this same lesbian—urged the gay men watching her
struggle to help her: "Why don't you guys do something!"
As the heroic fight by the lesbian who had twice escaped the car neared
its end, the crowd erupted. The anonymous author of the letter wrote
that the woman's fighting "set the whole crowd wild—berserk!" Both the
[**"Village Voice"] reporters are agreed that it was the lesbian's
struggle with the police that ignited the riot. [**]Truscott wrote: "lt
was at that moment that the scene became explosive." [**]Smith's
account pinpoints the policeman bodily throwing her inside the car on
the third and final attempt to put her in the vehicle as the moment
"the turning point came."<<<
As for Hormona, on the cover of Carter's book is the most famous of
very few photos taken that night (attached). It appeared in the “New
York Daily News” night owl edition, June 29, 1969, page 30, along with
an article headlined: "3 Cops Hurt As Bar Raid Riles Crowd." The
caption under the picture read: "Crowd attempts to impede police
arrests outside the Stonewall Inn, Christopher Street," and the blond
"cisgender" boy on the left among others doing that was Hormona.
Whether intentional or not, the expression on the face of Emmerich's
lead character in a film still is almost identical to Hormona's real
life expression in the photo that night.
Emmerich is unequivocally guilty of two things. First, deep throating
as so many have Puerto Rican "trans" icon Sylvia Rivera's Big Lie that
she was there. Her own best friend, black transvestite Marsha P.
Johnson (who everyone agrees was there, and Carter describes, "in the
vanguard"), told people that Rivera was actually over 30 blocks away,
passed out on heroin in Bryant Park. But Emmerich put a representation
of Rivera in the film though the character is allegedly supposed to be
a composite of Rivera and another Puerto Rican who was definitely
there, Ray Castro. Problem: Castro wasn't trans by any definition, and
had short hair. Yet the 2015 rioters have screeched the loudest that
Rivera, the "Mother of Stonewall," isn't prominently enough featured in
the film—someone who wasn't there AT ALL.
Second, apparently bowing to pressure from the crazies, Emmerich
altered the composition of an iconic real life photo, which he said had
inspired him, for his variation for the film's poster. The original is
of members of New York's Gay Liberation Front, the first new group of
any size to grow out of the riot(s). Emmerich’s version shows seven
figures, two of them African-American, and possibly one woman, it's
hard to tell.
As shown in the attached illustration, in the real photo there’s not a
SINGLE black person in the some 20 people, some half of which are
apparent lesbians. This is NOT to say that there were no
African-Americans and Latinos involved in GLF. However in the context
of the film, while I've yet to see it, it appears from this vantage
point that if any group is washed out it's LESBIANS. I've learned that
that long confrontation between the butch lesbian and the cops is
dramatized in the film, although I don't know yet how much or how
accurately. That no one appears to be talking about it is just further
evidence of how everything but The Party Line is being drowned out.
I'll find that out when I see it, which I intend to even as I expect it
not to be particularly good as "cinema." There are "good films" that
are terrible history, such as last year's "The Imitation Game"; so
terrible in that way, so misrepresentative of what Alan Turing was
actually like in his final years—defiantly, proudly gay—that it
canceled out the filmmakers' good intentions. I can't make that
judgement yet in this case, so for now I still wish to reward
Emmerich's good intentions.
And, most of all, I want to spit in the eye of those ruthless lunatics
who have stampeded so many into accepting a priori their REWRITE of
history, and demanding a pledge of allegiance to the trans flag—at
least THEIR version of it for, of course, those transgender are no more
of one mind than any other group.
I absolutely support transgender equality. But, sadly, the few with the
loudest dishonest voices are controlling the discussion, correction,
dogma now. Years ago some even began to insist on calling gay rights
pioneer and longtime female impersonator José Sarria "trans" even
though HE totally rejected that label. Apparently they control the
patent on self-determination. I wouldn't be surprised if the next thing
we're told is that Harry Hay and Harvey Milk were actually
female-to-male trans people of color.
Michael Bedwell

Stonewall - Jackie Hormona.jpg

Jackie Hormona vs Stonewall film lead.jpg

Stonewall poster vs original image.jpg
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