In I999, after a series of seemingly random yet totally synchronistic events, I became editor-in-chief of the national gay men's magazine GENRE. At the time, I was living in Los Angeles and discovering my place with the Radical Faeries, after having gone to my first life-changing Beltane gathering at Short Mountain in Tennessee. What I inherited at GENRE was a light and fluffy magazine whose editorial content catered mostly to the east and west coast "bodies-without-heads" circuit-boy crowd. Ironically, all the ads in the magazine were paid for by corporate interests bent on making a killing off the gay community: cigarettes, liquor, and HIV pharmaceutical advertising.
Together with a few of my closest friends, we set out to transform GENRE into something more intelligent and provocative, sort of a gay Vanity Fair. Instead of half-naked fake-gay male models on the cover, we put gay or gay-friendly Hollywood celebrities. Rather than blindly promoting circuit party events, we exposed the circuit's tragic mix of hedonism, drugs and unsafe sex going on under the guise of "AIDS fundraisers."
Over the course of a year and a half, we hired faerie writers, artists and models and interviewed Donna Summer, Bette Midler, Nathan Lane, David Geffen, Lil' Kim, Gilbert & George, David Sedaris, Pierre et Gilles, Guillermo Diaz, Cyndi Lauper, John Waters, Gore Vidal, Ru Paul, Erick McCormick (Will from WIll and Grace), Alexis Arquette and other A, B, and D - list stars. We agreed that our editorial would never carry the victimy, whiny, boo-hoo-the-religious-right-hates-us voice of the other gay rags of the time, and we created new sections devoted to gay spirituality issues, self-improvement, self-esteem, and being sex-positive. We got some rave reviews and won a few awards, but the publisher/owner was more interested in ad sales— not suprisingly, it turns out half-naked models on the cover sell more copies. We were all booted from the staff, but not without creating a loud ripple in the pond of gay journalism and spreading a triumphantly gay message to our 50,000 gay male readers across the U.S.A. Here is one of my favorite interviews.
The Cum Shot Heard Around the World
by Mo Weissinger (first printed in Genre Magazine #74, September 1999) Photo by Brian To [insert]
Senior editor at the Advocate for 19 years, Mark Thompson outlasted six editors-in-chief and contributed to more than 400 issues of the historic biweekly. His real publishing triumph, though, remains his seminal queer trilogy: Gay Spirit, Gay Soul and Gay Body.
"Being gay is not some perverted figment of straight people's imagination," Mark Thompson tells me in the flowering garden of his Silverlake home. "Being gay is a possibility, not a predicament." His soft-spoken words slice through the heat of a sultry, Tennessee Williams afternoon. "Homophobia is an inner wound formed when fathers first distance themselves from their young gay sons." It is this wound, Thompson believes, that serves as a gateway to the mysteries of the soul.
In his introduction to Gay Soul, Thompson writes, "Our soul is the repository of all that we feel: our appetites and ambitions, sadness and joy. It is the place where inspiration germinates and from which vitality grows. It is also a place of perplexity and unfathomable fear. Above all, our soul is the inner arena in which life's combustible opposites collide, creating dissonance and upheaval as well as harmony and stasis. Somewhere in this great container of ceaseless death and rebirth lies, too, the mystery of our being gay."
Having grown up in a "profoundly unhappy family" in Monterey, California, Thompson credits his tendency toward childhood escapism for turning him inward and onto a lifelong search for meaning and purpose. In 1979, he met Harry Hay, founder of the Radical Faeries, and attended the first Faerie gathering in the Arizona desert. "It was a watershed event in my life," Thompson remembers. "It was the cum shot heard around the world." In 1987 Thompson published Gay Spirit, the best-selling book distributed around the world now in its seventh printing.
Like Harry Hay, Thompson believes that gays are an "authentic people" whose time has come. "We are a separate ethnic class who—like the American Indians and the African Americans—have been handed the tools of our own self-destruction. Once we realize this, we can embark on a journey to discover a new way. Our wounds become gifts—the beginning of the creation of authentic gay Self."
"There is a constellation of elements at work in the world," Thompson explains. "Gay men bring an essentially needed point of view and have a rightful role in society that should be honored. Once we exorcise the ghost of our inner homophobia and release the weight of oppression, we realize that we are here to make a contribution to the world as a whole." For Thompson, being gay is a destiny, and discovering that destiny puts gay men on a path that contains its own unique twists and turns.
When Thompson set out to write his gay oeuvre in the mid '80s, he looked around and asked himself what was needed. "What was NOT needed was another coming out story, or another tale of sex between men," he remembers. Nor did he need "second-rate actresses on the covers of gay magazines validating my inner experience." He saw gay men gratifying themselves with threshold experiences, a whole subculture stripped naked to the waist, lost in sweaty Dionysian ecstasy. "We are shedding our body shame, and in that there is a therapeutic element, a sacred germ of transformation. But then what?" What was missing was the foundation for an authentic gay spirituality, our own path not cobbled together from the ugly crumbs left for us by the Judeo-Christian religions. Bringing together the courageous few gay spirits who shared his vision, Thompson compiled interviews with Hay, Don Kilhefner, William S. Burroughs, Gerald Heard, Mitch Walker, James Broughton, Paul Monette, Andrew Harvey, Ram Dass, Joseph Kramer and others, forming what is, in effect, the first Gay Mystery School.
For any gay man encountering uncertainty and self-doubt, the initial understanding and importance of embracing your gayness as the center of your life's destiny will emerge while reading Thompson's books. "We were put here on this earth for one reason," Thompson says, "and that is to be our own fabulous selves."
Mojo's life transformed in 2000 after dancing around the maypole with Short Mountain faeries for the first time. He went from having a career as a writer/editor in New York and Los Angeles to being a hippie living in a VW van. In Hawaii he studied the ancient healing practice of LomiLomi, and now lives in Berkeley where he works as a massage therapist. He edited this issue of RFD.
