Will Roscoe: "Radical Love, Visionary Politics: The Adventure of Harry Hay"
Will Roscoe was a friend and colleague of Harry Hay for over twenty years and edited Hay’s collected writings, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of its Founder. His own work, including The Zuni Man-Woman, Queer Spirits: a Gay Men’s Myth Book, Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America, and Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same-Sex Love, reflects Hay’s lasting influence.
Roscoe has been active in the lgbt movement since 1975, and as a community-based scholar, he has lectured extensively throughout the U.S., Canada, and Australia. He holds a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California at Santa Cruz and has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco State University. In 2002 he was canonized by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for his work promoting harm reduction at lgbt clubs and circuit parties.
Performance: Selections from Jon Marans’ The Temperamentals
Featuring Vince Gatton, Stephen Speights, and Joey Stocks.
Jon Marans’ The Temperamentals first appeared Off-Broadway in 2009, and returned again to a larger audience in 2010. The play beautifully interwove the story of the emergence of the Mattachine Society with the romance of Harry Hay and Rudi Gernreich. It was well received by critics and audiences alike: the New York Times described it as “intellectual, emotional and sexual,” while David Mixner later wrote that “the cast ably enables us to see their personal struggle as they ironically have to choose between the safety of accepting oppression and the risks of wanting to live in freedom.”
Marans has said that his interest in Hay grew from a show he wrote in 1999 that was adapted from a Studs Terkel collection of interviews with older activists called “Coming of Age.” Hay was among those that Terkel portrayed and so Marans wrote him into three scenes. But every time the Hay character appeared, he seemed to take over the scene. “I was just blown away by the response,” Marans said. “I thought, ‘Why is he stealing the show?’” Part of the answer, he realized, was that “Hay was a visionary and a revolutionary. He saw the world differently than anybody else did back in 1950, and there was something very exciting about hearing that. And he was joyously unapologetic about who he was.”
Screening of the film Harry Hay, James Broughton, and the Philosophy of Big Joy.
Harry Hay and future avant-garde poet and filmmaker James Broughton were lovers when students at Stanford University in 1931. They did not meet again until 1980 at a Radical Fairy Gathering. This program presents two of Broughton's films that Harry appeared in: Shaman Psalm, made at the second Spiritual Gathering of Radical Faeries in Colorado in 1980 and Devotions, about the many ways men can express love to one another.
The showing will be followed by a discussion about two of the spiritual godfathers of the Radical Faeries lead by filmmakers Stephen Silha and Eric Slade, who have just completed a documentary film on Broughton.
Cheryl Clarke: Of Faeries, "Faggots," Dykes, Queens, Queers, and Homophiles
Cheryl Clarke is a poet and essayist. She is the author of four books of poetry, Narratives: poems in the tradition of black women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), Humid Pitch (1989), Experimental Love (1993), the critical study, After Mecca: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers Press, 2005), and The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005 (Carroll and Graf, 2006). She is at work on a new manuscript of poems, By My Precise Haircut. She is currently serving as a Dean of Students at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J. Her writing has been published in numerous journals, anthologies, and magazines.
Film screening of Harry Hay, Activist, 1990-2002. Discussion afterward with Tim McCarthy.
Led by Jennifer Houseal, Kevin Ray, and Sherry Teitelbaum of Everybody Act!
This interactive workshop, based on 2011's "Bridging the Gap" project, in partnership with SAGE, uses theater activities to explore the generation gap within the LGBT community.
De Profundis by Lawrence Brose, uses vintage Gay erotica, found home movies, Oscar Wilde's prison letter and Frederick Rzewski's musical composition to create a meditation on Gay sexuality and an exploration of evolving concepts of masculinity. However, under the powers of the US Patriot Act, film maker Lawrence Brose has been accused by the Department of Homeland Security of downloading illicit images of children. Many of the still images from De Profundis are being used by the US Government to build a case against him. This screening will be followed by a panel discussion on Lawrence's case and the profound impact on queer artistic expression posed by the unchecked powers of the state in the age of the perpetual "war on terrorism".
Discussion afterward with Sarah Schulman, Jonathan D. Katz, Judith Levine, and Keith Gemerek
Led by Nelson Santos, Aldrin Valdez, and Ted Kerr of Visual AIDS
Foundational Sharing will create a salon atmosphere, making space for connections between what is being shared at the conference and the practice of participating artists. Join us as we braid together the living & the dead, the printed & the feeling, and the practiced & the spontaneous.
Bettina Aptheker is Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of five books including Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex and Class in American History; Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness and the Meaning of Daily Life; and Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech and Became a Feminist Rebel. Her current research is on queering the history of the Communist Left in the United States.
Professor Aptheker grew up in the milieu of the Communist Party USA. Her mother was a union organizer and her father a Marxist historian. Her first job was in the home of W.E.B. Du Bois and in 1964 she was a leader in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. After completing her master's degree at San Jose State University, she taught African-American and Women's Studies there. In the early 1980s, she completed her doctorate at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Scenes from Tony Kushner’s Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures
When Tony Kushner’s I-Ho (for short) opened at the Public Theater in New York in the spring of 2011 – having premiered in 2009 in Minneapolis – New York audiences rushed to see what Kushner had created. He offered what the New York Times deemed a “densely textured portrait of a Brooklyn family” brought together to confront the imminent suicide of its patriarch, a former Communist and labor leader.
Kushner has described the play as a “family drama,” somewhere in the lineage of Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, though in this family one adult child is a lesbian with an ex-husband, another a gay man with a long-term partner and a favorite hustler, and there is a sister who is a former nun and Maoist. Together they wrestle with their father’s and their own losses of faith. “I don’t know how to get out of the morass, either,” Kushner has said in reference to the play. “I just know that there’s a great deal of value in not running away from it. That’s why we made this weird activity” – meaning, theater. “So we could find social occasions to encounter these things.”
Author, editor and photographer Mark Thompson presents a slide show of his photos of Harry Hay and early Radical Faerie gatherings. Presented with the rarely seen early Radical Faerie short films Faerie Tales by Philippe Roques and FaerieFilm by Eugene Salandra.
Facilitated by Steven Watson, cultural historian, and Tim McCarthy, documentary filmmaker.
Harry Hay touched so many of our lives. Some among us knew him well, some had extraordinary encounters, and some had fleeting sightings. Whatever your experience, take a few minutes to record those memories in an oral history interview that could be preserved for future scholars and researches. Answer a few questions about how you encountered Hay, what your experience with him was, and what its impact was on you, and help preserve this slice of the past.
Led by Murray Edelman,RUtgers University, early Faerie and Gay Liberationist
Experience a trance state, connect with others, and examine the experience through spiritual and political perspectives. We’ll include some theory, oral history, and ritual.
Film screening of Hope Along The Wind. Discussion afterward with Director Eric Slade.
Facilitated by Steven Watson, cultural historian, and Tim McCarthy, documentary filmmaker.
Harry Hay touched so many of our lives. Some among us knew him well, some had extraordinary encounters, and some had fleeting sightings. Whatever your experience, take a few minutes to record those memories in an oral history interview that could be preserved for future scholars and researches. Answer a few questions about how you encountered Hay, what your experience with him was, and what its impact was on you, and help preserve this slice of the past.
Defying standards of narrative cinema and normative desire, embracing radical politics and documenting the freaky beauty of queer culture, these shorts range from video performance to stunning 16mm celluloid, from campy debauchery to sensual studies in light and texture. This program brings together filmmakers from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, and Seattle whose work exemplifies the passionate eyes of today’s queer avant-garde. Included in the program is Even, As You and I (1937) an avant-garde send up of European Surrealist film directed by and starring Harry Hay, Roger Barlow, and LeRoy Robbins.
Discussion Afterward with Malic Amalya, San Francisco Art Institute, Curator
Even: As You and I; Harry Hay, Roger Barlow, LeRoy Robbins; 1937; 12 minutes
Leafless; Nazli Dincel; 2011; 8 minutes
Ideal Geography; Jackie Davis and Heather Lane; 2010; 4 minutes
Gold Moon, Sharp Arrow; Malic Amalya & Max Garnet; 2012; 10 minutes
Beige Slow Change and Quick Change #203, Escape #5; Syniva Whitney; 2012; 6.5 minutes
CRY BOY CRY; Chris Vargas; 2012; 5 minutes
Things We Both Know (Not Our Real Names); Finn Paul; 2012; 7 minutes
Pedro Fernandez’s Cock; Animal, Vegetable, Mineral; The Symptoms; Cambois; Migueltzinta Cah Mai Solis; 2012; 9 minutes
George Kuchar, August 2011; Lindsay Laven; 2011; 8 minutes
My Night in a Butt Shell; Lindsay Laven; 2011; 5 minutes
At Least You Know You Exist; Zackary Drucker; 2011; 16 minutes
Facilitated by Steven Watson, cultural historian, and Tim McCarthy, documentary filmmaker.
Harry Hay touched so many of our lives. Some among us knew him well, some had extraordinary encounters, and some had fleeting sightings. Whatever your experience, take a few minutes to record those memories in an oral history interview that could be preserved for future scholars and researches. Answer a few questions about how you encountered Hay, what your experience with him was, and what its impact was on you, and help preserve this slice of the past.
“Heart Circle Practicum to Investigate Queer Consciousness”
Led by Chas Nol and Paul Wirhun.
John D'Emilio: "Do We Need Another Hero?"
John D'Emilio is a Professor of History and of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research areas include the U.S. since World War II, social movements, and the history of sexuality. A pioneer in the field of gay and lesbian studies, he is the author or editor of more than half a dozen books, including Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: the Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States; Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, with Estelle Freedman; Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, a National Book Award finalist; and e.The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture.
D’Emilio has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities; was a finalist for the National Book Award; and received the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime contributions to gay and lesbian studies. A former co-chair of the board of directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, he was also the founding director of its Policy Institute.
Tickets may be purchased for $20 in advance at http://harryhay.eventsbot.com.
There will be limited ticket availability at the door the evening of the performance.
After-Party at the Stonewall Inn.
Harry Hay’s appreciation of economic justice and the importance of economic conditions predated his founding of the Radical Faeries or the Mattachine Society. He was a member of the Communist Party first. His “visionary” perspective for the role of Gay people in society included an activism that was pragmatic and he often outreached to less empowered groups in society. He was an organizer and a leader that looked outward always for the common good.
Today U.S. Radical Faeries maintain an entrenched, albeit marginal identity within the wide spectrum of the American gay movement. While Faeries continue to cling to gender bending, unyielding expressions of free expression, weak anarchistic social activism, and a candle that serves as a search light for what makes up “gay spirituality,” one can argue they make a much smaller impact on the common good then Hay might have wished and certainly then this author believes is possible.
In particular the conversation and ethos of money as an organizational principle has been stunted in the Radical Faerie community to the great disempowerment of this otherwise potentially powerful group. A square look at the Radical Faeries attitudes about money creates an engaging conversation.
Radical Faeries embrace “No One Turned Away For Lack of Funds”, (NOTAFLAF), but this value is becoming strained in today’s economic hard times. Faeries also live collectively in a few “sanctuaries” around the country, but most of these exist on the deeply economic margin and include a tiny fraction of the Radical Faerie community at large.
Why have the Faeries, so empowered in so many areas, failed to empower themselves financially? What break-through is available for the Radical Faerie Community within this almost taboo topic? What might empower the Radical Faeries within an hyper-capitalist society to make a greater impact on the social good?
This will be held in room 102.
This presentation explores the ideas and activism of late nineteenth, early twentieth century Gay rights pioneer, poet, anarchist and socialist Edward Carpenter. It looks at his ideas about the social and culturall roles of Gay men in the larger society as part of a continuum of Gay self-conceptualization that began with Walt Whitman and continues down to today through Harry Hay and others.
This will be held in room 203.
Facilitated by Steven Watson, cultural historian, and Tim McCarthy, documentary filmmaker.
Harry Hay touched so many of our lives. Some among us knew him well, some had extraordinary encounters, and some had fleeting sightings. Whatever your experience, take a few minutes to record those memories in an oral history interview that could be preserved for future scholars and researches. Answer a few questions about how you encountered Hay, what your experience with him was, and what its impact was on you, and help preserve this slice of the past.
This will be held in room 205.
Free of charge and open to all, the Heart Circle was the centerpiece of Hay's teachings over the last decades of his life and remains a central principle of the Radical Faerie community. Hay learned the circle process from his years in San Juan Pueblo, Colorado, and used it to build community, to govern through consensus and to discover our true essence as "a separate people whose time has come". Everyone is invited to participate in the Heart Circle by speaking "from the heart" as the talisman, or talking stick, is passed around the circle. Speaking is not mandatory.
Open to the public, free of charge. This will be held in Room 101.
