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In the dream, half real life and half Broadway show, I'm literally laying in the middle of the street, kicked and beaten.

(How I got there, I have no idea.)

Suddenly, they're looming over me: a shoulder-to-shoulder chorus line of men in army boots and black jock straps, rainbow flags hanging like breastplates over their bare chests.

My friend M, one of the line, tosses me a black jock strap of my own, and extends a hand. I take both, and climb to my feet beside him.

The army boots, I'm already wearing. I fumble with the waist button to my trousers. Time for a little on-stage costume change.

I'm delighted to share that my latest novel, Leap! A Love Story, is now available in both paperback and ebook format.

This is my second Minoan-themed historical novel, the first one being The Last Priestess of Malia. Last Priestess is set at the end of the Minoan era, during the Mycenaean occupation. It provides a deep look into Minoan religion and culture, but it's a pretty heavy book.

Not Your Grandfather's Patriarchy

I'm first to the door when we get to the restaurant after my mother's funeral, so naturally I open and hold it as the rest enter. This means that I'm the last to the table. By the time I get there, one seat is left.

“We thought we'd put you at the head,” my sister says, “since you're the patriarch now.”

That crackling sound you're hearing? That's the sound of my toes curling up backwards.

Ah, patriarchy. For decades now, the term has been synonymous with unjust societal power structure.

I sincerely hope that by now we've all managed to get past the simplistic old matriarchy/patriarchy dualisms of the 80s. As pagans, we really should be smart enough to understand that the world is never quite that simple.

Best not to take our patriarchies too literally; best to remember that, like “Nature,” “patriarchy” is a term of convenience, a way of conceptualizing and talking: a semantic shorthand, no more.

Which isn't, of course, to deny that systematic injustices exist. (Look at the pay gap, if you don't believe me.) Still, we've come a long way since those days of comforting, simplistic dichotomies.

Maybe it's time to start thinking about the shape of what comes next.

In my family, we talk about food a lot. (Hey, it beats fighting over politics.) Over meals at family gatherings like weddings and funerals, we usually discuss where to go for the next meal.

Then, after weighing the various possibilities, everyone turns to the current family patriarch to cast the deciding vote.

For years, this was my Uncle Milton: a benevolent patriarch, if ever there was one. My father has admitted to me to having felt a moment of panic when, for the first time after Milton's death, people turned to him.

“I don't want to be patriarch!” he, too, thought. “I'm the clown!” Given the nature of birth-order politics, younger sons often become the family trickster.

Still, some social imperatives outweigh others.

Like my father, I'm a clown too, though for different reasons. Many, if not most, of my own stories lead up to a punchline.

Like other outsiders—think of Jewish humor—gay men often play the trickster in public. It's a social strategy, and an effective one.

We learn early that humor—especially self-deprecating humor—disarms, perhaps by making us seem less threatening.

Still, in these latter days, perhaps of all men, it's the fool who is best suited to be king.

“Pretty Fierce”

Because it tells the story of two South Florida high school seniors—one Jewish, one Hindu—falling in love, chances are Jared Frieder's 2022 film Three Months will end up getting slotted into the “Queer Cinema” box.

If so, that's a pity, since the film addresses larger and more universal issues as well, including the nature of being an outsider.

“What's it like, being Jewish?” the Hindu boy asks.

“There are seven kinds of Jews,” answers the Jewish boy. “Three of them are pretty fierce.”

Quantification aside (read: symbolic), that's surely about as naff a response as one could hope for.

So, what's it like, being a witch?

Angered by Garland Death, NYC Homosexuals Riot.

That was how I first heard about the Stonewall Uprising.

The long, hot summer of 1969. Judy Garland was dead.

In conservative suburban Steeltown, USA, a skinny, tow-headed stripling, who knows that he's different from other people and is trying to figure out why, hears the word “homosexuals” on the radio news.

His ears immediately prick up.

Angered by Garland Death, NYC Homosexuals Riot.

Nothing about centuries of deadly, Biblically-sanctioned oppression.

Nothing about decades of unjust, targeted police harassment.

Judy Garland, a known homosexual icon (Why?), was dead. Therefore, the homosexuals were rioting.

Takeaway #1: Nothing that these people do makes any sense. Therefore,

Takeaway #2: These people are not to be taken seriously.

Believe me, trivialization is nothing new to gay men. We've seen it for years. We see it still today.

When we and our experience are reduced to a single letter in an ugly, ever-expanding, and increasingly-unwieldy non-acronym, what is that but trivialization?

When we and our experience become just one stripe in an ever-increasing, ever-more-meaningless, ever more ugly “rainbow” flag, what is that but trivialization?

54 years have passed since that Summer of Stonewall. Much has changed. Much hasn't.

“Why do they hate us so much?” a boy growing up Evangelical once asked his father.

(True or not, this is a common belief among Evangelical Christians.)

“Because so many Christians are such jerks,” his father told him.

There are forms of Christianity that I, as a pagan, respect, even admire.

With its intellectual vacuity, utter lack of social conscience, and political triumphalism, Evangelicalism is decidedly not one of them.

Like many gender-non-conforming kids, I grew up socially isolated.

Elementary school wasn't so bad. Having grown up with me, the other kids mostly just accepted me for who I was. Junior high, though, was hellish. There I was the weird kid, the outsider. (There must be easier ways to learn self-reliance.) In high school I finally made some friends among the other egghead creatives. I loved my new friends all the better for understanding the worth of what I'd worked so hard to gain.

Then I lost most of those friends again to the so-called “Jesus Revolution.”

By then, my pagan identity was already fully formed. I could see their so-called “revolution” for what it actually was: a total abrogation of intelligence, an unthinking embrace of the worst kind of reactionary conservatism.

(I was right. My former friends and their co-religionists were precisely the demographic that betrayed us to Reagan and his successors, including Trump.)

Suddenly, the witch-boy was the pariah again. Finally, I decided to end it.

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.