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Charlie Murphy

1953-2016

What is the least that we have a right to expect from our fellow human beings?

Acknowledgment of shared humanity, yes? Surely that's the least that we have a right to expect?

With its faux herstory, shallow outrage over the Nine Million, and mindless eclecticism, Charlie Murphy's 198X song The Burning Times (“In the cool of the evening, they used to gather...”) just hasn't withstood the test of time. (“Isis, Astarte, Dee-AH-na, Hecate, Demeter, KAH-li...Inan-NA!”) Still, for a while in the 80s, it gave a voice to our collective longing, and became something of a marching song for the New Old Religion.

I met Charlie Murphy a couple of times back in those days. The memory still rankles.

We met first at a Gay Pride block party one evening here in Minneapolis. A mutual acquaintance introduced us as we stood in the middle of Hennepin Avenue, surrounded by a crowd of hundreds, in all our milling, bare-chested glory.

There's a cruel and deeply broken thing that gay men regularly do to one another. (Oh, not all gay men, and not all the time, but enough...gods help us, enough.) We disappear one another.

Here's how it works. When we meet, you have five seconds to exist: long enough for me to decide whether or not I want you.

If I don't, then poof! I disappear you. After that, we may be standing mere inches from one another but, baby, you no longer exist. I don't see you, I don't hear you. You're simply not there.

That's what Charlie Murphy did to me. He sized me up and, poof! I was gone.

Male-Male Transgression in 17th-Century Basque Witchcraft

In 1608, King Henri IV appointed witch-hunter Pierre de Lancre* to investigate a troubling outbreak of witchcraft in the French Basque country. According to de Lancre's report, this outbreak was fueled by the expression of forbidden sexuality.

When having sex with young men or women, the Devil, he reported, “took as much pleasure in sodomy as in the most ordered and natural voluptuousness.”

Men that he interrogated confessed to “performing sodomy” with one another, frequently with relatives, in order to “please the devil.”

One male witch confessed both to having frequently bottomed for the Devil, and topped other warlocks.

In the end, the judges decided that the Basque witches did not really believe in the Devil; rather, their witchery amounted to a mere smokescreen for the sex.

“And so they gathered,” they wrote, “and the naughtiest one among them pretended to be Satan.”

So, at least, claims Benjamin Ivry—without, I might add, providing any documentary evidence—in his 2000 biography of composer Maurice Ravel (8).

(What, you might ask, has any of this to do with Maurice Ravel? Item: Ravel's mother was Basque. Item: Ravel was born in the French Basque country. Item: Ravel was gay. Item: Ravel had a lifelong fascination with witchcraft and the occult. Item: As reflected in his music, Ravel had a lifelong devotion to the god Pan. Item: For the ancient Greeks, the phrase “to honor Pan” meant male-male sexual activity [16].)

While I have yet to confirm all of Ivry's historical claims concerning Basque witchcraft, my own research has turned up enough similar evidence to tentatively accept what he says as historical.

Certainly—as evidenced by the furor over “homosexuality” in contemporary conservative Christianity—in a hetero-normative Christian society, transgressive behaviors like witchery and same-sex sexuality quite naturally go hand-in-hand.

A Pride Moment

There was once a woman who had three sons, each more handsome than the next.

It sounds like the beginning of a fairy tale, doesn't it? In fact, it's a true story, and one of my favorite Pride moments: up there, in fact, with my first dorm-room kiss from my first boyfriend.

Scene: The community Beltane Pancake Breakfast.

(I live in Paganistan; things like that happen here.)

I'm sitting at a table, talking with the woman with three beautiful sons. Across the table from us, her youngest sits in his boyfriend's lap. They're kissing.

The room is filled with festive pagans. No one even notices the passionate same-sex lip-lock.

A bubble of happiness expands to fill my chest. “I've worked my entire life to get us to a place where two boys can make out in a crowded room, and no one so much as blinks an eye,” I think. “And here we finally are.”

Of course, in the gold of the human heart, there are no unalloyed emotions.

Oh, that lucky, lucky boyfriend.

Out of the blue one night I get a call from my first boyfriend. We haven't spoken since our explosive break-up decades before.

(A convert to Catholicism, who would eventually enter the priesthood, he told me once, “I love you more than I love God,” and then promptly freaked, because it was true. Poor benighted Christian, it never occurred to him that one best does the one precisely by doing the other.)

As we reminisce about our times together, he confirms something that I had long thought I remembered about that very first wine-fueled kiss.

There really were fireworks going off in that room that night.

He saw them too.

Not a Review of Kim Joel Booster's Fire Island

I am pagan. Therefore, I support the right to discriminate

As pagans, we understand the importance—not just the importance, but the value and, in fact, the cultural necessity—of any given self-selected group's right to exclude non-members while associating freely within itself: with the necessary proviso, of course, that such a right cannot be universal, but always (by necessity) time- and place-bound.

If this is so, then Kim Joel Booster's Fire Island may well be the most pagan movie of the summer.

Can't stand feel-good movies. Don't like rom-coms, especially gay ones. No big fan of Jane Austen, whom I really can't help but suspect would, if she weren't a woman, be read today only by English Lit grad students.

Here's what I really liked about this summer's gay feel-good rom-com, the newest iteration of the Pride and Prejudice franchise, though: with the exception of one nightmarish flashback scene, there are no straight people in the film. None.

A group of gay friends go to Gay Island for one last dizzying swirl of what passes for gay male “culture”, in all its shallow, abs-obsessed dysfunctionality.

Gods: how incredibly refreshing.

One lesbian. (Margaret Cho's character, though, is anything but token.) No straight characters. No (current media darlings that they are) trans characters. Not even any bisexuals. Just men for men telling our own story, for a change, with lots of gratuitous nudity, sex, and good-looking guys.

The Horned One be praised.

Not that I have nothing against trans folk, straight folk, or lesbians, mind you. Those stories, too, I value. It's just that everyone deserves a chance to talk about themselves every now and then. Enough about you: let's (finally) talk about me for a change, OK?

 Sexual Content

The Marinos Poems

Three Lost Epigrams from Book Twelve of the Greek Anthology

I

You turned down Marinos?

Marinos the Golden, heart-throb of Athens,

muse to ten thousand epigrams, this one included?

Well, Daphne fled from Apollo, they say,

fairest Olympian, gayest of gods,

for whom boys dance naked.

More the fool her.

II

"Bet you a blow job," said Marinos.

Now that's what I call unfair.

 Sexual content

“I mean, one of their initiations is letting yourself be sodomized,” says my friend, with obvious distaste. “Really, what's up with that?”

We've been discussing the OTO; he's alluding to the Ordo's XI° initiation. I'm not OTO myself, though I have friends that are. I am, though, gay. I could easily tell him what's up with that.

I will never, never get used to hearing a sacred act of love, one of the most intimate things that it's possible to do with another person, be spoken of with such visceral loathing. To my surprise, though, I don't find my friend's clumsy faux pas offensive. Rather, I find myself loving him for it. He's actually just given me a gift.

All too often, being gay, like being a member of any minority, means being reduced. You don't merit full personhood; you're always the gay guy. In this reducing atmosphere, of course, gay men, distressingly often, become synonymous with a single act of love, which (ironically) some of us don't even like. “Nothing like being reduced to one action,” a gay friend of mine once remarked, bitterly.

(Talking with an acquaintance at Pagan Pride one afternoon, I listened with increasing confusion as she spoke effusively about something that I'd supposedly done recently. Finally, I realized what was going on: she had confused me with D, the other prominent gay elder in the local pagan community. [You know, those gay guys all look alike.] I thought of telling her: “No, I'm the other gay guy.” I didn't, though; she would have felt humiliated to have made such a mistake. Aînesse oblige: elderhood obligates.)

What my friend has just told me, without realizing it, is that in his mind, I hold full personhood; I'm not gay first and foremost. It's an odd, and maybe even pathetic, thing to be grateful for, but I am.

The two of us have been friends for a long time; there's a lot of love between us. Still, there's an important point to be made here.

You may have seen the controversial scene in Skyfall—so controversial, in fact, that it was nearly cut from the film—in which the epicene Silva unbuttons Bond's shirt (Bond, of course, being tied to a chair at the time) and runs his finger slowly down Bond's chest.

“There's a first time for everything, James Bond,” he says.

Bond, of course, remains utterly unfazed.

“What makes you think it's the first time?” he asks coolly.

Was this, did you wonder at the time, mere Bondian bravado?

Or was it something more?

Let me tell you the story of James Bond's first and truest love, the beautiful Lin Yu Xian, and how his tragic, and premature, death made our James the man that he was to become.

(If you're wondering what any this has to do with Pagan Culture, my friend, let me suggest that you may want to consider getting out a little more often. Same-sex love is always inherently pagan.)

It all started when young James was only 16...