JHD: A Homeless Thinker | 1994

[(Editor's note: Originally published in the Windy City Times, January 6, 1994 as "A Homeless Thinker." Republished as schizo-file #45 in Damski's dead/qeeer/proud (Firetrap Press, 2001).]


 45"EARTH TO DAMSKI, EARTH TO DAMSKI." FUCK OFF! CAN'T YOU SEE I'M THINKING?...WHAT? OH...REALLY? OK...REMEMBER THAT VOICE IN YOUR HEAD? DO WHAT EVER IT SAYS: THAT'S THINKING.

There is nothing free about being a freethinker. Old Aristotle used to say “thinking is a process that begins in wonder.” My personal experience is that thinking is more likely to begin in horror and end in terror. Thinking is a process that leads nowhere. Your mother was right; you will never make a great living thinking. But that’s also its greatest pleasure. Thinking takes you out of here on a utopia quest.

It is a false notion to imagine that thinking leads people to a common ground. That’s for seminars and fairy tales. Thinking will not put you on the same ground with your fellow creatures. More likely it will put you in the clouds when they are on the ground and on the ground when they are in the clouds. Thinking will isolate you even from your closest friends. They will whisper behind your back: “I don’t get it,” “I don’t understand it.”

Thinking will leave you feeling homeless. It gives you notions and ideas that don’t fit anywhere, politically or socially. You become a displaced person. Like being Henry David Thoreau at the Water Tower mall in the middle of holiday shoppers. You look, observe and don’t buy. The manager thinks you are homeless vagrant, calls security and has you ejected from the store.

Yet you remain kind of child-like in your idiot state; everything seems like a first experience to you. To feel true paranoia, you have to have a mind to go out of in the first place. People with half your mind are always telling you to “think for yourself.” But when you do, they become nervous. You make them uncomfortable, so they try various ways to get rid of you. Calling you a “genius,” as they did Wittgenstein, is a very sophisticated way of getting rid of you. Sometimes, the Blue Meanies will apply simple brute force.

In school, teachers were always encouraging me to “think for yourself.” “Come up with your own ideas on this assignment.” But when I did, I stood the risk of being accused of plagiarism or worse. My teachers would act very puzzled. “This is not like what anyone else wrote or answered.” “How can I grade this?” Sometimes they would give me honors, other times special punishments. They would threaten to fail me for spelling and penmanship and skip over the content.

That’s why my official school records are so checkered. I would either win high honors, scholarships and fellowships; or be threatened with expulsion and sent to the administration with the other dunces, dyslexics and delinquents.

In high school, my senior honors paper in a special class on “The Philosophy of the East and West” got me into lots of trouble–as did a speech I gave in the William Randolph Hearst oratorical contest, which I titled “Lincoln, A Marxian Hero.” The head of the math department was in charge of senior honors. He thought my approach was too “literary” and not “logical enough.” He very much implied I was in danger of failing and caused me a lot of trauma.

Our final papers and test, however, were sent to outside graders who were in the philosophy department at the University of Washington. Surprise, surprise, the papers came back and I received the highest grade. My teacher, being an honest man, despite his personal reservations and warning about my future life, gave me the grade I earned.

My senior year in college I was runner-up for a Rhodes Scholarship and won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. I chose to go to Brandeis University, a Jewish school, majoring in the History of Ideas.

My college adviser thought I had made a poor choice and I was just committing myself to a “weird waste of time.” He insisted that with this kind of fellowship I could go to a good school like Harvard. 


When my senior orals came in political science, my adviser and his department assistant drilled me mercilessly. They, told me point blank that my thinking was “erratic.” (That’s news?) Had they known “how crazy I was,” they would have flunked me out years ago. The chairman of the French department was also on the orals committee. He came to my defense and saw that I passed and was able to go on to Brandeis graduate school, over the objection of my personal adviser.

When I reentered graduate school in classics at the University of Washington, I clearly told them and especially my adviser, that I knew I had a funny way of thinking. I came from the anti-rational tradition of counterculture. It was the ’60s and the whole campus was in revolt. They found me cute and said they didn’t care what, or how, I thought, as long as I performed well at the languages. They assumed that after I got my degree, I would teach in a small college in Ellensburgh, Washington and would never be an embarrassment to their department anyway.

Then, out of the blue, I got hired to teach Latin and Roman history at Bryn Mawr College, one of the top classics departments in the country. Suddenly my adviser and other members of the department took me much more seriously. They couldn’t have such a flaky thinker out East at such a fine place, representing their department. They must straighten out my thinking. Consequently, they put me through not one, but three, grueling Ph.D. orals over a two year period. It was pure hell. 

We mind-wrestled point by point, like guys in a macho straight bar arm-wrestling over a prize. The outside examiners told me later they were puzzled that I kept failing, but because of protocol, were afraid to interfere. My own thesis adviser was the worst culprit, because people out East would say I was “his boy” and he would lose points because of my queer way of thinking.

This was a department that would not acknowledge that Virgil was “gay." No wonder they thought I took “liberties with the text,” because I was also in a process of taking liberation of my gay life.

Over the years I have learned to stand my ground, which is really no ground, with greater humor. Friends and advisors mean well. They want the best for me, which is a life like they imagine they have. They don’t want some queer thinker ruining their show, or challenging their mythical chain of command and being.

But in my child-like state, I still find it curious that such a harmless act as thinking, or mental masturbation, can cause you violent and hostile reactions–so much that you sometimes feel homeless even in the company of friends.

© 2010 John Michael Vore and Firetrap Press.

JHD: Dignity and the Rat Master | 1986

 Orsetti detail which would be used for dead/queer/proud cover. Firetrap Press, 2002.

31YOU GOT KICKED OUT OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH? AND YOU WANT TO GET BACK IN? 

HELLO? THEY SHOULD WANT YOU.

The Vatican’s letter “On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” will not stop people from being gay or Catholic. But it will make life more tense when you try to he both gay and Catholic at the same time. Cardinal Ratzinger, writing for the Company of Men, asserts that gay groups (though he never calls us by name) such as Dignity, have no right to meet and hold services on church property. 

In an ironically gay use of words, the Rat wants us to obey his dignitas, which in Latin meant “office, rank and authority,” and was often used by the Emperor to refer to himself. The Society of Homos still have visions of extending the Holy Roman Empire to America. And they become very upset when ordinary Americans question their authority.

As the Rat states: “The use of church buildings by these (gay groups)... and permission to use church property may seem only just and charitable, but in reality it is contradictory to the purpose for which these institutions were founded: it is misleading and often scandalous.”

Should any “homosexual persons” come together on church property they must first abjure and renounce themselves: “No authentic pastoral program will include organizations in which homosexual persons associate with each other without clearly stating that homosexual activity is immoral.”

Lesbian and gay people are not welcome on church property. Harsh lines are drawn: it would seem that the only gay priest would be an ex priest, the only lesbian nun would be an ex nun and the only gay Catholic would be an exCatholic.

What do you do? Do you fight or quit? Stay on or drop out of the church? Do you attend services wearing a red letter “G” on your forehead and cause a scandal? Or, as one rebel suggested, do you chain yourself to your pew and force them to throw you out? It seems like the Holy Father is saying: “This is my church, love it or leave it!”

Fortunately, life is not a series of pseudo dramatic often neurotic either/or choices. As theologian Rosalle Muschal Remnhardt says, “you can be both/and and more/than.” When you are gay or lesbian there is no reason you have to cut yourself off from your church, family, or country. It is your choice how you place yourself. Inside or outside, or both in and out and more. Stay where it is comfortable for you. Adopt a style that is comfortable for you. Be confrontational, or moderational, as you feel free to be. Go along, or make trouble, do what you feel most expresses your love for your church and country.

Once you overcome the negativity of this Vatican letter and get yourself back in place a lot of issues will start to clarify. I can suggest a few and I’m sure you can think of others: 

1. If you want to get their attention fast start a movement to tax their Company. This is still America, where the idea of individual freedom prevails. Each person is free to act on her own authority according to the promptings of her own conscience. The founders of this country ran away from Kings, Queens (of either gender) and Emperors, to make this land the home of freedom. We are not now going to allow some Company of Foreign Men extend their vision of the Holy Roman Empire to our shores. We don’t accept the teaching of foreign potentates here, be they Ayatollahs, Bhagwans, or Popes. If the Company of Men in Rome want to assert their corporate rights of private property, let them begin to pay corporate taxes in America–and property taxes. Let the pseudo masters in Rome know: there will be no magisterium without taxation.

2.  The Society of Homos can't look you in the eye and won't have you in their "house". Ask yourself why.  Nowhere in the Rat's letter is the word gay or lesbian mentioned. They treat us as though we do not exist. They do not know our mores, our morals, our ways and means of existence. Their lack of respect and willed ignorance of us reveals much about themselves. They don’t understand that people who fight homosexuality are always fighting their own homosexuality. Since most of us have done the work it takes to come out, this is something we know that the Pope's gang doesn't. It's a Company loss, but they make us pay.

3. The Company of Men has "a long tradition" says the Rat. He's right. It's called lying and the Society of Homos have a special name for it: jesuitical "Crafty, intriguing, or equivocating person.” Though they say we "deceive" they are the real masters of deceitful Sophistry (here their magisterium fits). They've been "sodomites" for centuries: They ripped the "sin" of Sodom (inhospitality) out of its biblical roots, made up something new and have been killing people for this truly original sin ever since. The Rat takes the art to a new extreme: he blames us for the AIDS plague. Their letter on "pastoral care" (one more touch of sophistry) is a plague of words. It falls back on the Church of Rome. 

What are these liars hiding? They are on the run, terrified of the "gay" plague. They tell the world, that plague is AIDS. The thing that scares them, the dis-ease which freaks out these old homos, is a very young idea: two gays or two lesbians, together, publicly. Honest gays and lesbians threaten the entire Homo Order! Now we understand what the Rat means about "the lives and well-being of a large number of people."  He's out to save his Company of Men. 

If any of them are smart rats, they'd better start practicing 'pastoral care' at Homo Heights, first,  and leave morality to those who can handle it. I've been a witness to such strength: every breath taken by a person with AIDS is a moral act. Without serious homo (mental) health-care at the Vatican–and lessons about how to treat guests–the Company of Men has no healthy future. It will die of its own terminal theology. (Rome has fallen before.)

For the recovering Catholics out there, Ratzinger's letter is just one more piece of junk mail. Send it back: addressee unknown. Or trash it.

© 2010 John Michael Vore and Firetrap Press. Originally appeared in Damski's JHD column, November 27, 1986 and republished in Damski's dead/queer/proud as Schizo-file#31 (Firetrap Press 2002).

Jon-Henri Damski's Nothing Personal: Sleaze Buckets (1979)

Still from Nighthawks (1978), grabbed here.

"SLEAZE BUCKETS" | 1979

We, that is, homosexuals, or as they like to pronounce it on television, HOmo-SEX-U-als, are more and more in the news.

We are in the news because they want to know about us. 

Often, journalists report on our activities as though we were a sub-species, a sub-culture, or some subterranean night crawlers from another planet. 

The rule is: when talking about homosexuals, keep your distance. Never expose your own sexuality. Hide behind your objectivity. But this rule and style of reporting often breaks down, because in matters of sexuality, there is no clear and fixed distinction between them and us. 

When you are talking about homosexuality, it is hard to tell who is them, who is us, and who is hiding. The traditional canons of objectivity fail. 

People are always saying you can't be a little pregnant without eventually showing it. True. But you can be a little gay without ever wanting to show it. In fact, that's the state most people live in. 

And so, since there is always a little bit of us in them, journalists have difficult time with us. 

Most journalists, when talking about homosexuals, get their facts right, but err in interpretation. For straight facts often lead to queer interpretations. 

Roger Ebert in his review of Nighthawks

 (Sun-Times, Oct. 16, 1979), for example, has all his facts right, but his quasi-objective and distant point-of-view distorts his interpretations. 

For Ebert, Nighthawks is a movie about them (gays)--for them. And his conclusion is: let's hope nobody is like them. 

He keeps his critical distance from us and our world, and he dutifully reports in his liberal family newspaper that gay is sad, and gay is bad. 

Factually, he is right: Nighthawks is a dull, uninspired, two-star movie. It has left town after a week at the 3 Penny.

 Even with foreign kudos, it couldn't hold an audience: gay or curious. 

Jim, the school teacher/nighthawk, is an anti-anti-hero: so ordinary that he stirs little more than a yawn. Sure, he does the best his lukewarm British flesh will allow, but he has a difficult time keeping a stiff upper anything. 

The movie is so ordinary, in fact, that it begs all kinds of interpretations. And a critic can't just say, "well, folks, that was one I slept through." So Ebert fills in with gratuitous interpretations and musings on gay life. 

For Ebert, Jim is a victim, his haunts are gloomy, and his life, dead end. And the last and only good thing you can say about the movie is that it was playing at the 3 Penny, and not at one of those male "sleaze buckets" on Clark Street. 

For Ebert, Jim is a victim because he cannot find an "Enduring Relationship," which according to Ebert is the "social epidemic" of the 20th century. 

But: male homosexuals have been having and surviving transitory relationships for centuries. It's nothing new for us. That's why we are probably better able to cope with this urban situation than most self-proclaimed, married-again monogamists. 

True, among homosexuals you will not find too many American Gothic, til-death-do-us-part couples. In a gay "marriage" it's more likely that both partners will be holding a pitch fork. 

There are millions of couples in New York, Chicago, and London who have discovered that an exclusive, one-on-one relationship is not essential. Many of us don't even have an enduring weekend together. 

But that does not mean life is a horror show. It means we have changed our expectations, or totally abandoned them. And for us it's not a dead end; it's a life cycle on speed. 

Further, to call homosexual haunts gloomy is a prudish cliche. Gloomy for whom? That's where we find other guys, our sex partners, our sun shine. 

It might seem sad to you, an outsider, because you are not there for what we are there for. But the wait is worth it, honey; the wait is worth it! For when the arrow hits the target, you scream inside like a Zen master. 

And as for "sleaze buckets": I remember the Newberry Theater [note: a gay porn theater],  now a parking lot on Clark. Cold seats, fat men, leaking roof, stink bombs, and the projectionist sleeping at the switch. 

Who used to go there? Dirty nighthawks. Sure. 

And kids from the suburbs. Who found out about the all male sleaze bucket from reading Roger Ebert's Sun-Times movie section. And since they never read about an all-male anything else, they would flock to the Newberry, often for their first coming out experience. 

Yes, I remember one kid, in his early twenties, arriving at the Newberry on a cold, rainy Friday: going to the bathroom, showing a half of dozen men what he had to offer: and then, leading them, like a good shepherd, down in front to the cement floor, and while another dozen men watched, he made sure there were a lot of satisfied customers at the Newberry that night. 

And all the while he performed, there was a movie going on above them. Duffy's Tavern, with a couple of long haired blond kids making it on a pool table, while the Stones rolled on in the background. Talk about Apocalypse Now. Talk about a real movie experience. 

So, Mr. Ebert, do keep your critical distance: for if you were to slip into one of the sleaze buckets on Clark Street, and review one of our movies, it just might turn out to be a living experience. 

And if you looked down beneath the screen, I just don't know who you would recognize. 

Originally published in "Gay Chicago," October 25, 1979.

© 2010 John Michael Vore and Firetrap Press Cooperative.