Weekly Checklist 1/6/23
Hello Friends. I’ve gotten some really nice feedback that you are digging the Check List and I am excited to try to stay more regular with you. Please let me know what you like or don’t like about it and what you might like to see more of.
For Your Cultural Health:
I am happy to let you know that I am co-producing a screening of AIDS DIVA: The Legend of Connie Norman (2021) A Documentary film on the extraordinary life and times of Connie Norman, late Transgender AIDS Activist, and LGBTQ media spokesperson, in early 90’s Los Angeles, directed by Dante Alencastre on Tuesday, February 7, @ Antioch University, 400 Corporate Pointe, Culver City, 90230, with a reception starting at 6:00 p.m. and screening at 7:00 with a panel moderated by me including LGBTQ Leader Torie Osborn and Dante. I am also in the movie! See the attached blog.
RSVP Here : https://bit.ly/AIDSDIVAScreening
For your Diversity Health:
I have always been a fan of Imani Perry, but her just recently published book, “South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation” is one of the poetic non-fiction books on the subject of America’s racist past, present and future I have ever read. Ms. Perry, in case you don’t know, is so darn prolific as an interdisciplinary scholar of race, law, literature, and African-American culture who is currently the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She also writes on queer subjects. I am also reading her 2018 work, “Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation.” As the New York Times says: “The conviction of this book is that race and racism are fundamental values of the South, that “the creation of racial slavery in the colonies was a gateway to habits and dispositions that ultimately became the commonplace ways of doing things in this country.” What I love most about the book is how beautifully Perry moves backward and forward from memoir writing to academic writing to hip-hop in a way I deeply envy! Do not miss this masterful work!
For your Spiritual Health:
I have to admit, maybe it’s the skeptical Bronx Native in me, that I have come to the esoteric arts of Astrology and Tarot late in life. As synchronicity would have it, I have been getting clients as of late that are geniuses in both realms. I will have more to share here, but because I am a beginner, I would direct your attention to a classic of Tarot, “Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom,” by Rachel Pollack. Just reading the book was a trip. I bought a deck. And I bought “My Daily Tarot Journal” which invites you to ask a question, and pull one card, and then meditate on the card and, thus learn, one step at a time. If you do this, drop a line and let me know how it goes. I might actually start to YouTube what it’s like for a Professional Psychologist to explore their interest in the esoteric healing arts. And, as Jew, the Tarot seems to come from the Kabbalah?
For your Queer Health:
I bought Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries, published in 2018, and edited by Lee Harrington and Tai Fenix Kulystin, and didn’t really take a more intensive look till recently. If you are an academic like me, even though my roots are in the origins of the Gay Movement, which are spiritual in nature, the queer academy has been more concerned with theories of knowledge and how we define things (epistemology) than matters of the heart (feeling) or intuition (magic). But this book deserves a more serious look, TBH. First off, the book is impressively intersectional and it manages to weave epistemological issues without losing a direct connection with the reader. It teases apart from interesting issues impacting the queer spiritual community that intersect with questions concerning identity politics. Here is a line from the “Inclusive Wicca Manifesto”: “Inclusive Wicca is not for people who want to stay safe and cozy in their heternormative cisgender worldview, pretending that racism is not oppression is not happening and that racism is a thing of the past.” And how about this: “Diversity is important in celebration, theology, and cosmology. We do not accept the narrative of a goddess and a god interacting at different points of the Wheel of the Year because that reinforces the cisgender and heterocentric gender binary.” And just look at how diverse the Table of Content: “Queer Tantra: A Queer Black Woman’s Perspective” “The Queer Gods of Alchemy” or “Power from the Edges: An Exploration of Magic to Support Justice Workers.” I am going to be reading this book cover to cover and discussing further on Social Media. Maybe one concern is to make sure that the wisdom tradition and erotic power of homosexual men are not erased, which can happen a lot in queer theory. So I won’t throw the baby out with the bathwater but will keep in more deeply and keep y’all posted.
For Your Psychological Health:
Speaking of gay men, I would like to draw your attention to the delightful Netflix Show, “Love, Victor,” inspired by and set in the same world as the 2018 film, “Love, Simon.” Michael Cimino stars as Victor, a teen from a half-Puerto Rican, half-Colombian-American family living in Atlanta. It’s interesting to watch how Victor, a likable teenager performs the work I recall doing myself before I came out, which is being the “grown-up” to his acting out sister and squabbling parents. His mother, a dark-haired beauty, and his father, a warm-hearted machismo man are more gentle versions of my parents who were going to be devastated that their eldest was not going to be a traditional “mensch” for them. So a lot has changed in our community, but the pressures to fit into heteronormative moral conformity are just as strong as ever. I have been liking “analyzing” Victor’s move to and fro his internal homosexual organizing principle vis-a-vis the other organizing principle of being the kind of person our Parent Society wants to be. It’s confusing for him and he doesn’t want to lose social capital, yet he also has integrity. Let me know what you think.
