Queer People Need Their Mythologies by c. huilo marvavilla c.
A few years back I was at San Francisco Pride celebrating being a same sex-loving being. I found myself dancing with the colorful tribe known as the Radical Faeries in Faerie Freedom Village. This was the first time I had been to Pride in almost ten years, since the days of enormous transformation our community went through under the guise of a harrowing virus. Later, I wandered from the feathers, glitter and tattoos into the larger, mundane part of Pride. As I looked around, I realized that queer people, gay people, two spirits, homosexuals—whatever the label—are people who now live largely without a mythology. And so I set off on a sort of quest to create one, to reconnect the queer community with an artful, vibrant and fun mythos. When a community is stripped of their fundamental story structure, the part they play in the collective consciousness, it becomes easy for others to say, “you’re wrong, you don't fit in, go away.” Queer people have become ostracized because few remember our mysterious, magical, beautifully complex legacy. While there may have been token references to something more in high school history or human sexuality classes, for the most part gay is seen today as just a sexual thing.
I remembered a profound insight I had at Pride: I saw the drag shows, leather bars, sexual protocols, all, to some degree, as rituals, shamanic shape-shifting, but lacking a unified mythology or tradition of guided initiation. I could see why queers need self-help books, but it seemed to me, after years with the Radical Faeries, that queers have an even greater need for ceremony, for ritual celebrations of their faggotry. I had discovered at an exhibition of my art in San Francisco, called "Homoeroticism and the Sacred," that many straight people wanted to have a stronger base for integrating their queer friends, siblings, teachers, doctors, etc. into their lives, into their culture. The idea for a book of my own began to coalesce. The story had to be fun, mystical and pragmatic all at the same time—definitely not didactic. Luckily, I was nudged by my publishing friend to do some field research, to play around as a “queer myth man,” which I gladly did—playing toward developing characters for my story. And... now I have told it. It's called Flight of the Jaguar Magician, and it's available at amazon.com—or ask for it at your local bookstore. I’ll be selling it at Gay Pride in San Francisco this year and at other of my haunts from time to time. [Booksurge Press, paperback, 60 pp., 21 paintings in FULL color, 7" x 10", $20.99, ISBN: 1-4392-3647-X booksurge.com]
Author, artist, performer, director, Huilo emerged from a background in advertising, public relations and graphic design, to become what he refers to as an “art doctor,” developing tools to guide consciousness into multi-dimensional realities—while having fun and being impeccably honest about the dire situation of humanity.
