Radical Gay Politics

My community and political work in the gay world started in earnest in the mid-1970’s at what was then called the Gay Community Center of Colorado located on Lafayette street in Denver. A fortunate circumstance involving the movie The Word is Out and a lesbian friend named Katherine led to my meeting Harry Hay and John Burnside in 1978.

Harry and John became mentors and guides for me not only in the world of the Radical Fairies but politically and socially in a much broader sense. Harry was convinced that us Queer folk were a distinct cultural minority. He felt we had many unactualized gifts to bring to the human banquet. Our goal as gay people was to address the following questions: Who are we? Where do we come from? What are we for?

This view of gayness continues to direct my LGBT community work. That we are fundamentally different (not necessarily better) in many ways from the heterosexual majority and that it is these differences that define our essence seems patently obvious to me, and rarely do these difference involve what we do in bed.

My spiritual, primarily Buddhist, work over the past couple decades though has led me to the realization that it is all really just one taste. I always liked Harry’s analogy about different windows on the world. Gay people may look out of a different window and therefore see things a bit differently but when all is said and done it is just one world.

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