Queer Gnosis

by Troy Williams

podcast the entire interview

If you don’t know Jim Dabakis, you don’t know gay Utah.

He is one of the co-founders of the Utah Pride Center and Equality Utah. He is a former talk radio host on KZJO.  He’s a world traveler and a fantsy-pants Russian art dealer.

Jim’s main talent though is bringing people together. Even enemies.   In the early 80’s he traveled to The Soviet Union and developed a friendship with the Russian people.  More recently, Jim and the so-called “gang of five” opened a dialogue with the LDS leadership, which led the Mormon Church to endorse non-discrimination ordinances in Salt Lake City.  Soon, Jim is taking off to a university in Iran for a six-month teaching gig. Humble yet outspoken, he commands the room with an over-the-top personality that makes him an irresistible force. We spoke recently on KRCL’s RadioActive.

Troy Williams: Tell me about your former radio show on KZJO.

Jim Dabakis: I started in 1976.  Joe Redburn was actually the first guy ever to do a talk show in Salt Lake and I used to listen to him.  And that’s what I wanted to do.  I had a lot to say and nobody to listen to me!

TW: I know the feeling!  KZJO is now K-Talk?

JD: Yes, and I worked for KALL as well. Talk radio was different then.  It was less vitriolic.  You had a conservative for one hour, a liberal the next and they were friends.  It was much more congenial.

TW:  Was your show balanced, liberal, or just you ranting?

JD: It was maybe 20 percent political.  But there is a giant world out there with lots of interesting things.

TW: Were you “out” back in those days?

JD:  I’ll tell you how I came out.  I was on KALL radio filling in for Tom Barberi.  The scheduler had made a mistake and they had another host, Gayle Ruzika.  So both of us were in the studio together and we didn’t have the best rapport.  Two or three days later I was filling in again with my co-host John Prince.  And someone called in who sounded suspiciously like Gayle Ruzika, and said, “Are you gay? Yes or no – just answer it!”  And poor John, a very straight guy was paralyzed. And I said, “whoever you are, and I think I know, of course I’m gay, but don’t worry, your husband is too old for me!”  And that was it.  KALL never called me back again.

TW:  Was that the death of your radio career?

JD:  I was on air for thirteen years, said what I wanted to say, and I packed up and moved to Russia in 1989.

TW:   I read that in the early 80’s you traveled to Russia and snuck away from your bus tour dressed in D.I clothes to meet the people.

JD:  I got bored and I didn’t want to go on the Red Square tour, so I escaped and wandered around.  I ended up at the English speaking part of Radio Moscow and I met a guy named Vladimir Pozner who was their chief propagandist.  We became buds.  Eventually I invited him to the states.

TW: Did people ever say, “You’re crazy!”

JD: I remember on the streets of Leningrad, there was a guy who was obviously following me.  I knew it, and he knew that I knew it. The Russians eat ice cream from the street no matter what the weather is.  I bought two ice cream cones, held one out, he walked by and took the ice cream cone.  I walked on and he continued to follow me.

TW:  You bought an ice cream cone for the KGB?

JD: Yeah, (laughs) it could have got me in a lot of trouble!

TW: Jumping forward.  You were one of the co-founders of Equality Utah.   Over the last six months they have passed seven non-discrimination ordinances in both workplace and housing.

JD:  I leave the organization and they flourish!

TW: It was really made possible by the endorsement of the LDS Church.  You were instrumental in bringing them to the table to talk.

JD:  After Prop 8 and the kiss-in at Temple Square with Matt and Derrick, they reached out to us. And when we met them, one of them said, “it’s such a pleasure to meet the BLT community”.  They were trying.

TW:  Do you see cracks in the prejudice that some Church leaders have?

JD: I think there is a great diversity of opinion among the top Church leaders.  It’s an evolving position that goes back and forth.  Let’s just hope it continues to move forward.

TW: After the Church endorsed these ordinances, there was a poll that said 67 percent of Utahans also supported the ordinances.  Which was an 11 percent jump.  Which is cool – but also suggests a theocratic group mindset. That’s also scary.

JD:  Yes, but if you can convince one person and change everything, isn’t that easier than a thousand demonstrations and a million chants? Do you want to be effective or just be out there enjoying the agitation?  Remember it was the Church that single-handedly turned the country around on the M-X missile due to Ed Firmage in the mid 80s’.  He convinced the Church that this was not in their best interest. Those buffoons Orrin Hatch and Jake Garn were all for hiding these bombs all over Southern Utah in little shelters so that the Commies would never know where they were.  Hatch and Garn couldn’t be more for it until the Church said they were against it.  Then they switched gears.

TW: Coming up, The Great Satan is meeting the Axis of Evil.  You are heading to Iran to teach for six months?

JD:  Last May I was asked to participate in a seminar in Tehran on “Sexual Minorities in Religious Communities.” I loved it.  Every experience there was fabulous.  After the seminar we rented a vehicle and traveled all over Iran, and met amazing people.  Invariably, wherever we were, people wanted to talk to us, invite us to their home, tell us how crazy their president was, recite poetry.  These are a very spiritual people.  Their culture is fabulous.  I loved it and I’m going back.

by Troy Williams

“2, 4, 6, 8, Smash the Church, Smash the State!” was one of the rallying cries of the Gay Liberation Front – a radical group of queers that organized in the late 60’s and early 70’s.  Tommi Avicolli Mecca was one of the original organizers.  He edited the new anthology, Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation, which brings together diverse essays chronicling that establishment cracking era. Organizations like Dyketactics, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, Radical Lesbians and the GLF exploded onto the scene with the ambitious goal of total social/global transformation.  I recently spoke with Tommi on KRCL’s RadioActive.

Podcast the entire interview here.

Troy Williams: You grew up in Philadelphia in an Italian American home in the 50’s and 60’s.  I imagine that was rough for a queer boy.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca: Yes, it was a traditional Roman Catholic home and yes, it was very rough.

TW: You talk about sneaking off to anti-war marches.

TAM:  Yes, by16 I was sneaking off to anti-war and civil rights marches because I felt a great sense of social and economic justice.

TW:  And how did your family react?

TAM:  My family was Republican.  My father was very pro-America with that nauseating sense of blind patriotism.  It’s really weird that his generation turned out that way, because if you look at the history of Italian immigration, a lot of them were anarchists and socialists involved in the union movements of the 30’s.  But somehow my father’s generation ended up very conservative.

TW:  Do you think that was assimilating to the new culture?

TAM:  Yes, It was all about assimilation.  It was about not wanting to be victimized for being different. Italians were treated like crap.  We weren’t considered white when we got here.  We were considered barbaric and inferior.  Writings from the turn of the last century compared Italians to monkeys.  There was no use to even educate us because we were just going to dig ditches for a living.  That was not unusual.  All immigrants were treated like crap when we got here because the dominant Anglo-culture didn’t like us and didn’t want us here. Italian-Americans over-reacted and became more conservative.  And I think that’s a good parallel to what a lot of queers have been doing since Stonewall.

TW: You discovered the Gay Liberation Front at Temple University.

TAM: I went to Temple to avoid the Draft.  And I’m very proud of that!  I didn’t have the courage to get arrested and thrown in jail.  I couldn’t do that to my family.  I knew Temple had a reputation as a radical working class school. It was the only college in Philadelphia where working class kids could afford to go.  When I got there the first thing I did was join Students for a Democratic Society, which was a radical anti-war group.  I helped organize when Kent State happened on May 4 of 1970.  And then I heard about Gay Liberation.  I went to a meeting and I was scared out of my mind! I couldn’t hide anymore.  Any rationalization I had made about being queer all dissolved the moment I made the decision to walk into that room. It changed my life.

TW: That was a whole different culture.

TAM:  Back then, not only could we be arrested, we were arrested! There were bar raids and they would cart out 50 to100 guys and take them to jail.  The next day the daily papers would publish their names, addresses and employers.  These peoples’ lives and careers were wrecked.  The police had total discretion. You weren’t assumed to have rights. I don’t know that there is really any way for people who didn’t grow up under it to really comprehend what we went through.  It really was the dark ages.

TW:  Talk a little about the name, “Gay Liberation Front.”  This was a take-off of the National Liberation Front that was fighting U.S. troops in Vietnam.  That was incendiary!

TAM:  Yes, but that was keeping with the times.  Look at the three words — they are very important. “Gay” was not popular at the time.  “Homophile” or “homosexual” was.  “Gay” was a radical word.  I know it’s hard to believe now.  Back then it was radical to call yourself gay rather than homosexual.  Next, “liberation.”  Who was using words like liberation?  It was the Black Panthers.  It was women’s liberation.  Liberation was associated with radicals and revolutionaries.  And then “Front”, which was very consciously taken from the Vietnamese group. We were rejecting all the old words and defining ourselves.  “Gay” is how we will define ourselves.  “Liberation” because that’s what we are about.  And “Front”, because we were in solidarity with all oppressed people, including the people that this country was trying to kill.  It was a real slap in the face.

TW: The equivalent today might be a radical group calling itself Al-gayda?

TAM:  Or the Gay Terrorist League!

TW:  How did more conservative organizations react to the GLF?

TAM: There was certainly friction between Gay Liberation and some of the older homophile groups.  They were taken back because we were so brash and in your face.  We defined “in your face”.  Homophile groups for years were trying to work with the American Psychiatric Association to get homosexuality removed from the list of diseases.  They were doing it in a nice, polite way.  We started invading, disrupting and taking over their conferences.  There was a famous conference in LA where Gay Liberationists went to the conference, all headed up to the stage, pulled the mic out of the hand of the guy speaking and said, “we are the Gay Liberation Front, we are now in charge and you’re going to listen to us!”  That was our attitude.  We don’t have to respect you if you are oppressing us.  That was all over. We were now going to tell you how to define us.  And we were going to tell you the new terms of our relationship.  Homophile groups were really taken back by that.  They were really into assimilation.   They said, “We have to be nice. Women have to wear dresses and men have to wear suits. We have to look good.”  Gay Liberation didn’t care about that. We built more alliances with Black Panthers, The Young Lords, Women’s Liberation and the anti-war movement. That was where are real coalitions were.  Eventually the more conservative gay groups came along, but we were more at home with the leftist groups.

TW:  Let’s jump forward a bit. I recently attended a large gay fundraiser for a national organization – and the event started out with this big sponsorship video – “equality is brought to you by BP, Goldman Sachs, Chevron, etc.”  My heart sank. Are we a market or a movement?

TAM:  You’ve hit the nail on the head.  We have become a market.  There is no doubt about it.  We started that progression to a market back in the 80’s when the Gay Press Association (which I was part of) decided to get national ads.  They started promulgating the myth that gay men had more disposable income than anybody else.  And that began the progression.  At that point, because of AIDS, there was no resistance.  Act Up came along, around the same time, but it was so focused on the drugs and taking care of people, which it had to be.  They couldn’t focus on what mainstream people were doing.  David Goldstein, who was the publisher at the time of the Advocate, and other self-proclaimed leaders of our community nationally, were trudging ahead behind the scenes. They were building coalitions with these corporations and pressuring them to have pro-gay hiring policies, etc.  Really it was about how they could make more money as publishers, and how they could create a class within our community that would be a monied class that could then control the community.  In the meantime the real radicals were on the ground fighting AIDS.  That’s how we lost the battle against assimilation and the whole corporatization of our movement.  By the time we woke up and realized what had happened, it was well into the 90’s, and suddenly we were facing a movement that none of us recognized.  Look at San Francisco.  Here, we have these “A Gays”.  They’re realtors and landlords, and they screw over tenants, queer or straight, low-income — doesn’t matter.  These rich gay folks are as much a part of the problem as anybody else.

TW: Is the emphasis on conservative values of marriage and military a sedative to keep us docile?

TAM:  It’s worse than that.  It’s a total sell-out of gay liberation.  It’s a total sellout of the poor and working class in our community.  I really see it along class lines. I think this marriage and military stuff is a total attack on the poor and working class in our community.  It’s basically giving the middle class what it wants, which is respectability and assimilation.  And the price is that we are elevating folks into a middle class status, just like the immigrant Italian communities did.  You create ta middle class, and the middle class becomes the acceptable people.  You do that by stepping over other people who are needy.

Here in San Francisco 40% of homeless youth are LGBT (and there are 5,000 homeless youth).  40% of people with AIDS in San Francisco are either homeless or inadequately housed.  How does this happen?  75% of transgenders in the Bay Area don’t have full-time employment.  How do we have such outrageous numbers?  We have such poverty in our community.  The Williams Institute recently showed that the queer community is just as poor, if not poorer than the straight community.  How have we come to this when we have so much wealth in our community and all these contact with corporations? Where is the progress?  So when people come to me and say that marriage is our primary fight, I say no, it’s poverty!  Homeless youth come here for refuge and find they can’t afford apartments even if they have jobs.  The rents are set outrageously, artificially high by gay realtors and others, who inflate the rents by speculating on properties.  I think it’s an insult when people say that marriage and military are the end all of our equality.  If that’s equality I don’t want equality.  I want a war on poverty in the queer community. That to me should be our priority. Instead we pay $43.3 million dollars last November to defeat Prop 8.  We’ve never spent a fraction of that to house homeless queer youth!

TW:  We need to have this conversation about fair redistribution of wealth and power.  We are terrified in this country to talk about that.  Particularly in the queer community.

TAM:  Because it’s socialism.  We’re always afraid of the “S Word”.  This country is psychotically afraid of this word.  We have socialism in America. Social Security is socialism! Unemployment Benefits are socialism!  We have all these forms of socialism in this country.  People would never want to give any of these things up.  People rely on them. Socialism is about safety nets.

TW:  What a crazy concept, to use the engine of capitalism, the greatest wealth creator we have, to actually benefit the most people as opposed to the fewest people. But now I’m on a soapbox!

TAM:  Oh we’re on a roll!  You know, I personally want to get rid of all marriage.  I don’t think the state has any business marrying anybody, or legitimizing any relationship.  The whole marriage thing goes back to male property rights, and women and children being seen as a property of the man.

TW: The white man.

TAM:  The word familias from the Latin meant a man’s collection of slaves, his wife, his children and his property.  The origin of “family” is not good. It was about power and property rights. But regardless of all that, if people want to marry, yes, they should have a right.  If people want to go into the military yes, they should have that right.  But I want to dismantle the military.  I want a Department of Peace, not a Department of War.  I want us to be mediators.  I want us to be out there making peace in the world, not out there making oil companies richer by waging wars in the Middle East.  On the one hand, yes of course, I support civil rights.  But on the other hand, it’s not my priority.  My priority is a war on poverty and redistributing the wealth so that everyone has some.  And the environment!  We’re not going to be around if we have more oil spills like this.  The problem is I feel like my voice is a minority voice.  Unfortunately, the marriage people have struck a nerve in middle class people and generated a mass movement that won’t go away until they can get married.  And then once they get married they’re all going to disappear and we’re going to be left here still fighting for poor and working class people.

by Troy Williams

Last night on RadioActive I aired my interview with the filmmakers behind the new documentary, 8: The Mormon Proposition, Reed Cowan (director) and Dustin Lance Black (narrator).  We discussed the paper-trail of Mormon money and organizational influence that funded California’s anti-gay proposition.  The film opens in Salt Lake City this Friday at the Tower Theatre. The film will stay longer if it sells well, so please help pack the place and keep the dialogue going.

Listen to the interview now!

by Troy Williams

For those paying attention, it’s becoming obvious that we are living on a planet in peril. Climate change, war and economic instability are among the many threats we face.  But though the future appears grim, there are some optimistic trends emerging.  Jeremy Rifkin’s book, Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, is a hopeful, yet measured study of where we’ve evolved from, and who we could become.

Rifkin argues that empathy has the potential to unite humanity through a mass networked biospheric consciousness.  The downside however is that the technology that could unite the global family may just destroy us first. We spoke last January on KRCL’s RadioActive.

Listen to the entire podcast here.

Troy Williams: You begin your book with a discussion on “the great paradox.”  The systems that bring about the potential of global connectivity are also threatening the survival of our species.

Jeremy Rifkin: It’s one of the conundrums of history.  We are in a seminal turning point at the history of our species. All of the telltale signs say that we are in big trouble. The last 18 months have signaled the endgame of the great industrial age based on fossil fuels. Recall in 2008, when oil hit $147 a barrel on world markets.  Inflation went through the roof.  Prices soared.  We had food riots in 30 countries.

Purchasing power plummeted. The whole economic engine of globalization came to a halt. That was the earthquake.  The financial markets that collapsed later was the aftershock. In December 2009 in Copenhagen, world leaders came together to discuss the Entropy Bill for the industrial age of spent carbon dioxide.  Our leaders could not cut a deal and it ended in collapse.  Despite the fact that climate change may be the biggest threat we’ve ever faced.  Why were world government and business leaders simply unable to anticipate or respond to the meltdown of the industrial revolution?  Why were they unable to come to an agreement on carbon targets even knowing that this could imperil the human race?

The fault does not lie with new mechanisms of global trade or carbon target treaties.   Our leaders are using 18^th century ideas to address 21^st century problems that are now biospheric in scope and global in their economic reach. We learned from John Locke, Adam Smith and Decartes that human beings are autonomous agents, self-interested individuals who pursue our own material drives.  Supposedly, we’re competitive, aggressive, utilitarian and pleasure seeking.  But if this is really who we are, then we’re doomed.

TW: So, humanity really needs to develop new ways of thinking, fast.

JR: Over the last ten years some of our best biologists and neural-cognitive scientists are discovering new things about human nature that actually put into question these old 18^th-19^th century ideas.  Our scientists are discovering that many primates, especially human, are actually biologically wired for empathic distress.  Our biology predisposes us to feel another person’s own plight.  To feel their joy, pain, pleasure, as if our biology was feeling it ourselves.   We are discovering mirror neurons. All of their new discoveries suggest our basic drive is to be social, communicative, to find belonging, companionship and to be empathic.  And if those drives are not met, because of bad-parenting, schooling, or society, then the big, secondary drives, like aggression violence, narcissism take-over.

TW: How does this all then challenge the old model?

JR: It has forced scientists to ask what are the mechanisms through history that allow us to extend our empathy and change consciousness.  Obviously, the way we think today is not the same as a medieval serf.  And their consciousness and neural circuitry was quite different from a hunter/gatherer 30,000 years ago.  Big changes in consciousness occur when two things happen.  First, human beings change how they organize energy on the planet.  Second, we change how we communicate.  New communications revolutions organize new energy regimes.  When energy and communication revolutions come together it changes consciousness.  For example, the Sumerians in Mesopotamia captured the sun in photosynthesis in barley and wheat. The grain became stored energy.  Before that time they lived in little villages with rain fed, garden agriculture.  The Sumerians took thousand of men away from villages and put them to work building huge irrigation canals for hydraulic agriculture.  They created the royal granaries and roads for distribution. It was so complicated they needed to have a communication revolution to manage the new energy, so they created writing — cuneiform.

In the 19^th century we had convergence of communication and energy with print technology and steam power. Cheap print led to mass literacy and public schooling which converged with coal, steam and rail.  In the 20^th century we had a convergence of communication energy again, this time with electricity.  Telegraph, telephone, cinema, radio and television became the communication vehicle to manage and market the internal combustion of the auto age.

TW: Describe what you call mythological consciousness and how that relates to the sense of self.

JR: If you look at every forager/hunter society in history they had oral communication.  Every one of them created mythological consciousness. There was no sense of self as an individual. There was no world for “I”.  It’s all a collective “we”. They had not developed to a point of differentiation of roles in to a well-developed self. As we create more complex energy consuming civilizations and communications to manage them, we have to create more differentiating roles.  The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.  As People become more individualized they have to become more integrated into complex societies.  That’s where empathy becomes the social glue.

When you go to the great hydraulic civilizations that are religious based, or based on script, empathy extends to people of the same religious affiliations; Jews with Jews, Christians with Christians, Muslims with Muslims, etc.

In the first Industrial Revolution of the 19^th century, print communication ushered in ideological consciousness and we begin to extend empathy to people of the same national origin. For example, Americans think of Americans as extended family.  When you get to the second Industrial Revolution electricity ushers in psychological ways of thinking.  We think therapeutically, whereas our grandparents thought ideologically.  Empathy now extends to like-minded others.  This isn’t a neat linear progression.  There are holocausts and genocides littered through history.

But there is still a dogged progression of empathy from blood ties, to religious association, to national identities.  So the question is now that we are in a globally connected society, is it a big stretch to imagine we could go beyond these old identifications and even begin to identify as homo empathicus — as a human race?  I don’t think it’s a big stretch.

TW: With the advent of the Internet and instant text messaging vis-à-vis satellites, we are now entering into global communication that may precipitate global consciousness.  The potential is there.

JR: It’s there, but then we’ve got the empathy/entropy paradox.  It’s bittersweet.  As we develop more complex, energy consuming civilizations and bring new communication together to organize more people across wider terrain, we bring more diverse people together. We can now extend empathy, sociability and trust.  But our more consuming civilizations also use up more energy which creates more entropy.  So now we are in a very inter-dependent inter-connected global civilization.  And there is no doubt our younger generation is beginning to empathize with people all over the world. The bittersweet conundrum is that we may be on the summit of thinking as a global family at the same time our civilization is taking us to the brink of extinction.

TW: You write, “the very act of identifying with one another’s struggle, as if it were one’s own, is the ultimate expression of equality.”  And now we see great social movements; civil rights, women’s suffrage, the LGBT movement, etc. People are starting to see themselves in “the other”.

JR: Empathy is a very grounded, complex ensemble of emotion and cognition.  It has a whiff of death and a celebration of life.  When we become existentially aware of our individual history it allows us to reach out to another being and realize that they too have a struggle to survive.  It’s extremely tough being alive.  When we empathize with another it’s because we deeply feel their plight. We are rooting for them to flourish and be. Those are the moments where we transcend ourselves and feel super alive because we are in solidarity with other life.

visit the Empathic Civilization official website.

by Troy Williams

The popular City Weekly blog Gavin’s Underground features an interview with the hosts of KRCL’s RadioActive this week.  Thanks to Gavin Sheehan for taking the time to feature our work.

Read the entire interview here.

And here is a little teaser…

Looking over the landscape of Utah news talk radio, about 90% of what you’ll find is politically polarized with very little interview. Its not exactly what you would call “standard”, but it is the way we’ve come to know how those shows are produced. A host picks a topic and a side and rants for hours. Very few have made the effort to turn that time into an open forum for guests and more importantly, their audience, to join in a discussion without being told “how wrong they are.” Luckily for us that remaining 10% does a far better job than the rest, like the show we’re looking into today.

RadioActive has been taking a provocative and engaging look at both community and national issues for nearly eight years now. Serving as half the news department for KRCL, the hour-long program with a daily variety of rotating hosts and topics covers every subject in the spectrum from political affairs and social standards to media matters and even local entertainment, all while maintaining the heart of the program as an interview and call-in show. I got the opportunity to chat with the Executive Producer of the show, Troy Williams, as well as all seven hosts about the show and the roles they play in keeping the program informative. Plus their thoughts on local broadcasting and a few other topics. (All photos by David Newkirk.)

Brandie Balken, Lorna Vogt, Tamrika Khvtisiashvili, Ashley Anderson, Flora Bernard & Troy Williams. Nick Burns (below), and Robert Nelson (unpictured)

by Troy Williams

First off, thanks to Lance Black for his generous article on SLC in OUT Magazine.  He was incredibly generous and thoughtful in his writing.  The LGBT community is making great strides in Utah due to the hard work of many different people and organizations.  And it’s great to see people recognized for their efforts.  On a personal note, I’m thrilled that so many of my friends were also featured in the article — the fantastic photography of David Newkirk, the wit and wisdom of Josh Moon, Matthew Landis and Princess Kennedy — and of course Utah superstars Brandie Balken, Jon Jepson, Valerie Larabee, Jim Dabakis and Bruce Bastian.  These are just some of the folks who make SLC a great place to live, work and do activism.

Thanks Lance for recognizing and acknowledging the work being done in Mormon Country!

Pillars of Salt

by Dustin Lance Black

“As goes California, so goes the nation.” That, at least, was the conventional wisdom, on which I imagined the leaders of the Mormon Church bitterly reflecting as hundreds of gay couples lined up to wed on June 16, 2008, following an equal protection ruling by the state supreme court.

As a once-devout Mormon from Texas who grew up thinking of Salt Lake City as the promised land, it had taken the fight over Prop. 8 to fully open my eyes to the lengths the leaders of my former church would go to ensure my inequality. And it was why I agreed to narrate Reed Cowan’s 8: The Mormon Proposition, a documentary that holds the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints accountable for their political and personal investment in the passage of that iniquitous law.

Still, when Reed called me to share the good news that The Mormon Proposition had been accepted into the Sundance Film Festival, I waited a bit too long to book a ticket and got stuck with a layover in Dallas — where I found myself thinking back on the antigay testimonies I once heard on Sundays, the stories of shock and reparative therapy, and wondered how someone like me would survive there.

That curiosity got the best of me. By the time the plane touched down in Salt Lake, I’d scrapped my plans to spend the weekend in a posh cabin up in Park City, a half-hour away, and instead dedicated myself to finding out what Salt Lake City was like for LGBT people. How does this perceived hotbed of homophobia stack up? In short, how gay is Salt Lake City?

TROY WILLIAMS: THE “MILITANT HOMOSEXUAL”
Troy Williams, executive producer and host of KRCL’s RadioActive, is pretty much the voice of progressive politics and gay liberation in Salt Lake City. We’d met at a screening of Milk there 18 months earlier, where he’d assured me the city had a thriving gay scene and was on the front line in the fight for equality.

Williams grew up Mormon in Eugene, Ore., went on a mission to England and Wales, and moved to Utah to start school at Brigham Young University. But when he returned from his mission, he says he was “terrified of that nascent queerness lurking inside me. I sublimated all my sexual desires by volunteering for the Utah Eagle Forum,” a far-right, antigay organization. Before long, he had become good friends with the chapter president and notorious antigay crusader Gayle Ruzicka.

But ask the blond, all-American Williams if it was hard to come out in Salt Lake, and he responds, “Hell no! Being queer actually saved me. It saved me from Mormonism. Utah is actually incredible. It provides a great opportunity for cutting your teeth as an activist.”

Which is exactly what Williams has done since coming out, harnessing the energy of the grassroots and becoming the Cleve Jones of Salt Lake in the process. When state senator Chris Buttars made a now infamous statement comparing gays to Muslim terrorists in February 2009, Williams sprang into action. His Buttarspalooza event was not just a protest, but a party — “a celebration of Chris Buttars’s ability to unite Utah’s progressive populace,” as Williams frames it. And his willingness to “scare the shit out of powerful people” has earned him the ultimate compliment from his former boss: Ruzicka now refers to him as “a very militant homosexual.”

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE!

by Troy Williams

Journalist Alexander Zaitchik quotes me in his new article in the Washington Independent.  His story details the Patrick Henry Caucus’ efforts to further push their “state’s rights” agenda on Utah and the world.  The quote that was most alarming came from my old friend Gayle Ruzika, who claims that the PHC will be represented by “well over half” of the state legislature by 2012.

Zaitchik’s new book Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance will be out this June.  He will be on RadioActive June 8th to talk with us.

Meet the Tea Party Activists Who Defeated Bob Bennett

The Patrick Henry Caucus: Utah States’ Rights Group With National Ambitions

Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah) (EPA/ZUMAPRESS.com)

From Pennsylvania to Arizona, incumbent Republican senators are increasingly under siege from their right flanks, where Tea Party activists have mobilized to challenge every establishment candidate within charging distance. Tea Partiers rightfully took credit for Rand Paul’s recent upending of the Republican establishment in Kentucky. And they’re not done yet. Next on the list: longtime Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

The first electoral jolt signifying that times have changed came at the state Republican convention in Salt Lake City on May 8, where three-term senator Bob Bennett was forcefully knocked off the November ballot in two rounds of voting. So too were a number of other Republican incumbents deemed too moderate in style or substance by the convention’s 3,500 delegates. Press accounts of Bennett’s defeat have generally focused on the state’s peculiar nominating system, in which an otherwise popular candidacy can be derailed at precinct-level caucuses that elect delegates to the closed party convention, from which only the top two candidates survive to face the voting public.

The state’s caucus-and-convention system, however, tells only half the story. Bennett and his fellow GOP casualties did not fall victim to Utah’s election system alone. Nor were they felled simply by some vague anti-incumbent mood. Rather, they were victims of a well-organized and increasingly dominant Tea Party coalition that over the last year has established a tightening grip on Utah’s Republican Party—and that has big plans for the rest of the country as well.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE!

By Troy Williams

The most dangerous challenge to patriarchy and globalized capitalism may be the queer intellectual.  These are the “pinko commies” that the Christian Right is warning America about.  The queer intelligentsia that is far too radical for polite liberal politics.  They’re not invited to speak at fancy fundraisers sponsored by BP and Goldman Sachs.  They are not interested in assimilation.  Rather, they offer an oppositional response to heterosexual tyranny.  They are not interested in a “place at the table” as much as they are in smashing the table and building something new.  The following are the most dangerous queer authors I’ve read.  Their ideas dare to offend conservatives and liberals alike.  If you are feeling adventurous, and willing to consider points of view outside the mainstream, then pick one up and have a read.  Let me know what you think!

10) Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market; Alexandra Chasin (2001); A thoughtful critique of the gay-oriented niche consumer market that perpetuates the very economic system that disenfranchises women, people of color and the poor. “There are gay men and lesbians for whom sexuality is not the primary source of their difference from the universal ideal; the insistency on the primacy of sexual identity ignores other identity features, such as race and/or gender and/or religion, and thus generates an assimilationist politics that reduces diversity to a superficial value, a matter of choice in the food court.” Anybody have their HRC Visa Signature card handy?

9) Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity; edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (2006); This raw collection of essays violate everything we believe about power and identity.  Mattilda wants to “make people reach too far, to roll into critical, complicated, dissonant essays that grumble with uncomfortable revelation.” You will meet Nico, the mixed-race, transgender butch defying the “tyranny of identity” and Stacey, the BDSM feminist who proclaims,  “I have been endlessly educated and I still yearn for a firm grip on my throat”.  Transfags, genderqueers, faux queens, and other “hyphenated individuals” transgress on every page.

8) The Invention of Heterosexuality; Jonathan Ned Katz (1995); Before the 1900’s, “people did not conceive of a social universe polarized into heteros and homos.” Katz argues that the “heterosexual ethic” is actually a modern invention. “Heterosexual and homosexual refer to a historically specific system of domination – of socially unequal sexes and eroticisms.  It makes as much sense, then, to look for the cause of heterosexual or homosexual feeling in biology as it does to look for the physiological determinants of the slave’s mentality or the master’s.  Biological determinism is misconceived intellectually, as well as politically loathsome.  For it places our problems in our bodies, not in our society.”

7) Sexual Fluidity; Lisa Diamond (2009); A great companion to Katz.  Discussions centered on the origins of homosexuality are often reductive appeals to “nature” or “nurture”. Diamond’s research challenges old arguments and expands our notions of desire, behavior and identity.  “Our ability to understand the complex phenomenon of sexual orientation and its multiple manifestations in men and women at different ages and in different cultures and contexts depends directly on our willingness to confront those aspects of orientation that most confound us.”

6) God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence; Michael Cobb (2006); Religious hate speech has positioned queers as the “quasi-enemies of the state.”  The United States “continues to evolve into a coercive, extralegal empire that needs enemies inside and outside it’s borders”.  For the Christian moralist, we queers embody the “social ills and impurities” of the nation.  Cobb argues that queers should embrace hate speech to inspire a new radical politics. He also posits that it might be helpful to hate an America which “relies not on freedom, but inequality to keep moving forward into unprecedented accumulations of power and wealth.”

5) The Queer Child: Or Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century; Kathryn Stockton (2009); “This book scouts the conceptual force of ghostly gayness in the figure of the child.”  More specifically the fictional gay children that haunt all childhoods. As we explore the “sideways” growth of the protogay children of literature, Stockton helps us recognize our own lateral movements through life.  Where do we grow when we can’t “grow up” into legal queer adults?

4) Homocons: The Rise of the Gay Right; Richard Goldstein (2003); Goldstein skewers the conservative rhetoric of “the new gay mainstream” promulgated by gay authors like Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer and Camille Paglia, who Goldstein describes as “attack queers.” “If there’s a motive for this assault, it has less to do with gay rights than with assimilation.  Job number one for homocons is promoting the entrance of gay people into liberal society.  But this deal comes with a price.  It requires gays to maintain the illusion that we’re just like straights, and precisely because it’s image is a pretense, it must be upheld by shaming those who won’t play the part.  Attack queers target these unassimilable homos, thereby affirming the integrity of heterosexual norms.”

3) Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance; Ann Pellegrini and Janet R. Jakobsen (2004); The authors reject “tolerance” as a desirable social condition for queers.  They argue that tolerance reinforces hierarchies of inequality.  Love the Sin is an unapologetic appeal to value sexual freedom.  “If a lesbian or gay does good, then the good it performs is not for homosexuals alone.” In their book, sexual and religious freedom come together to provide a “deeply ethical vision of the work sex can do to open up new horizons of possibility between people.”

2) Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation; edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca (2009); This subversive collection of essays from the early queer voices of the 60’s and 70’s will both shock and inspire.  Radical trailblazers from The Gay Liberation Front, Third World Gay Revolution and Dyketastics “were not looking for marriage and corporate jobs or acceptance into the military or the church.  They were into communal living and multipartnered sexual arrangements outside of the jurisdiction of the state and the family.” These are the writings of revolutionaries.  “We truly believed that a united front with all oppressed peoples would help us create a better world, one built on inclusion and an equal distribution of wealth and resources.”

1) Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy; Lisa Duggan (2004); Queer liberation collides with “neoliberalism” – the ideology of unregulated free-market global capitalism.  It’s a philosophy with a major objective: dismantle the progressive social gains of the New Deal, feminism and the civil rights movement.  Duggan illustrates how mainstream gay activists are now buying into the larger neoliberal project.  We no longer hold a “vision of a collective, democratic public culture, or of an ongoing engagement with contentious, cantankerous queer politics.  Instead we have been administered a kind of political sedative – we get marriage and the military, then we go home and cook dinner, forever.”  Duggan reminds us that there will never be meaningful queer equality without redistributive economic justice first.

The above list is of course far from exhaustive.  I haven’t read every thing that is out there.  If you have a transgressive suggestion, please send it my way!   I want to know, “what is the most dangerous book you have ever read?”

a tribute to my Mormon mothers.

by Troy Williams

My mom passed away last December after a long battle with breast cancer.  Part of me is still in disbelief. Everywhere spring is emerging.   Life is everywhere.  And yet on this Mother’s Day I can’t call home to talk. She’s gone.  There is a bitter ache of finality. And I feel that awful weakness.  Nothing I do can change anything.

It’s last October and I’m in rehearsals for The Passion of Sister Dottie S. Dixon.  The call comes from Oregon. My mom has at best two months to live. I stand in the empty hallway of the Rose Wagner barely able to speak. I try to sit in the theatre and watch Charles Frost rehearse.  His talent so brilliantly embodying the Mormon mom every gay boy wishes he had.  The mom I wish I had.  Pain hammers my chest. I leave the theatre into the autumn cold.  I can’t help but compare the mom of my birth with the mother of my pen. Mom was certainly no champion for gay rights, but she was spirited and strong.  Through life she carried the pain of childhood sexual abuse.  It shadowed her constantly.  It’s so common an occurrence.  So ordinary in this world.

I think ultimately that is why I became a feminist.  My mother and so many other women I know have endured humiliating abuse at the hands of men.  Mighty patriarchs who see their women as commodities.  Anger sparks inside my soul.  I insist that the world be different. For my mom.  For everyone.

In 1978 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints excommunicated Sonia Johnson.  A mother demonized by the Church for her unyielding support of the Equal Rights Amendment. In a used bookstore I find her memoir, From Housewife to Heretic.  I flip through the pages and wonder,  “Who is this woman?”  I’d heard stories as a kid.  But only fragments.  Cautionary tales of an apostate who chained herself to the gates of the temple.  Legend later had it that she became a lesbian separatist.  How can I resist?  I thumb through the pages.  Sonia muses, “I can’t seem to remember how I used to think when I wasn’t thinking.” I’m sold.  I spend the next few weeks engrossed in her writing.  Every page delights and infuriates.  I see Sonia as a brave conduit channeling a new consciousness into the world.  A prophet despised for truth.  A herald for that other world.

I realize that much of my contribution to writing Dottie was inspired by Sonia. An upstart mom at odds with her Church.  By play’s end, Dottie’s “passion” has reversed global warming, established world peace and insured equality for all.  In her final apotheosis she becomes Mother Dottie and exits the stage to create her own planets. Better ones.  In my mind Dottie is a sacred conduit for the divine feminine energy that fills and nurtures the earth, worlds without end.  The theatre goes dark.  I close the book.

My earthly mom passed away two weeks shy of her 50^th wedding anniversary.  It’s such a breath-taking experience to say goodbye. I’m holding her hand. I feel warmth through her skin. Please let me stay suspended in this final moment.  I look into her eyes, realizing that I will never see her again.  I love you, I love you, I love you. I can’t say the words enough.  I grab my luggage and walk out the door.  I can barely breathe.

Later, back in Utah the call comes.  “She’s gone.”  And that’s it.  She is gone.  In the quiet dark of winter, long forgotten memories effortlessly surface.  Slivers tweezed from scraped hands.   Praise lavished over mediocre accomplishments. Hugs and Mickey Mouse shaped pancakes.

I re-enter the doors of my parent’s chapel.  The bland décor and sterile halls feel so much smaller now.  The Relief Society is preparing food.  I am a stranger here.  Atheist.  Feminist.  Queer. As I shake the bishop’s hand time stops.  Emotions surge. I am acutely aware that his Church is dedicated to my legal and social extinction.  In my mind I scream, WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE!? but other words meekly escape my mouth, “thanks for everything.”  I look around and every member of the Relief Society looks like Dottie.  They are working hard.  Doing their duty. And I resent and love them all at the same time.

During the funeral I find myself wishing mom would have been a lesbian. Dumb thought, I know.  Being gay saved me, why couldn’t it also save her?  And maybe we’d have more in common.  In my fantasy Sonia sweeps in and whisks my mom away to some enchanted lesbian commune in Santa Fe, far away from the world and church that believes women should be submissive obedient helpmetes.

Fantasy elides reality. But isn’t that why I’m an activist today?  To create another world?  Maybe. I’m far too impatient and hopelessly earnest.  In her final chapter Sonia writes,

“For the sake of the preservation of the human race, women must establish equality on this planet.  Surely we understand that to win human rights for women, upon whose oppression the entire economy of the world rests, will require far greater immoderation, far greater sacrifice than has ever been necessary before in human history.  We also know that immoderation – radicalism, if you will – is in the mainstream of the most hallowed American tradition.”

Or as Dottie would say, “We all need ta stand up fer the marginalized and miniaturized people of the earth.”

Their words vindicate my radical zeal.  In my soul are a thousand revolutions.  In my mind a million new worlds to be born. Perhaps that is the greatest gift given to me by my Mormon mothers; the belief that I really can create my own planet.   A world free from patriarchy, sex abuse, and social inequality.  I do believe that another world is possible.  And I want to create it here.

To Sonia Johnson and Dottie Dixon – thank you for inspiring me with fire and passion.  To my mom – Frances Jeanette McGary Williams, thank you for creating my life with your blood and sacrifice. I will always love you.

Happy Mother’s Day.

by Troy Williams

In the wake of the Gulf Coast oil disaster we must stand together and seize the moment.  The time has come for a massively subsidized clean energy project funded by mammoth size corporate taxes on the Fossil Fuel Industry.  The new energy grid must be a nationalized endeavor owned by “We, the People.”  Power provided by wind, tidal, solar and geothermal must be aggressively pursued and harnessed with American zeal.  The days of corporate dominance of energy, privatization of public resources and elimination of essential social programs are over.   The “drill, baby, drill” crowd can fuck off.  We are all environmentalists now.