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:The Pope's Gay Bangers | 1986

Early iteration of  what would become Damki's 2002 Firetrap Press book, dead/queer/proud.

30THE POPE'S HOMO GANGBANGERS (OR, RELIGION AS RETROVIRUS–NOTHING FUNNY HERE).

We’ve all known for years that the Pope and his gang at the Vatican live like homos without the sexuality. They are men who prefer the company of men. They are the Society of Homos and they prefer to run the church from Rome as a company of men. And they lay down laws and discipline the church as though it were an army of men.

In their everyday life they imitate the homo lifestyle without the sexuality. To get rid of their guilt, they come out in public and condemn the homo lifestyle, without acknowledging that it is pretty much their lifestyle too.

I have never been in a living situation with a high prelate for longer than a week; I see them most at meetings and interviews. I think they avoid and contain their sexuality as much as is humanly possible. I would not say that homosexuality is rampant inside the church–they are not a bunch of horny gay Thornbirds.

They behave more like retroviruses. They replicate the homo lifestyle and get everything backwards. Instead of having homosexual urges, they have power urges: and, often, the will to gay bash and destroy comes over them. Everything gay must seem alien to them. They feel they must attack and invade the living gay cell in order to control and ultimately destroy it.

In speeches and proclamations they babble on endlessly about “inclinations and tendencies” of the homosexual kind. I am a gay person. I have no tendency or inclination to be a homosexual! I am light years beyond that point. The Pope and his gang dwell and live at that point. Often they seem like timid men stuck in a teenage hang up.

Gay is the way my life force flows. I am not back at the crossroads deciding whether I should be or do gay. They are still at the crossroads. Talking like top men, they want us to hang up our sexuality on a cross. In their company of men you can he homo, but not sexual. Everything sexual is a disorder to them because it threatens their nice order, their theological company. They are pure homos: they don’t want their order disturbed.

When you join the Society of Homos you put your body on the cross between homo and sexuality. You give up your own sexuality for the love of Jesus. As Cardinal Ratzinger put it in the Vatican’s recent letter On Homosexuality: ‘Just as the cross was central to the expression of God’s redemptive love for us in Jesus, so the conformity of the self-denial of homosexual men and women with the sacrifice of the Lord will constitute for them a source of self-giving.” After a little act of psycho-castration, you too can join the Company of Men and live on ethereal Homo Heights.

The Catholic church has always been an eternally fascinating and attractive organization for young men. And in reverse, the Church has been eternally fascinated by and attracted to young men. They share a homo symbiosis.

Many young men come to join an order and be a priest because they are having trouble handling their sexuality-or are handling it too much. They feel compelled to join the Company of Men where they can be pure homos and at the same time escape their sexuality–give the troubled thing up. When they arrive, the church gives them a cross and a stiff doctrine to hold on to.

In many cases the solution works. Most clergy toe the line of celibacy. And those who can’t usually quit along the way. The church allows you to forget your body and yet keep some of the manners, forms and gestures of the homo lifestyle. You can wear elaborate ecclesiastical drag. The Bishops at their conference in Washington, D.C. could buy many “gay” sartorial trinkets: gold-filled pectoral crosses, brilliant colored sashes, bishop rings and magenta zucchettos (skullcaps) lined with chamois.

The society at large tolerates a lot of gay theater inside the church in ceremony and dress. They allow men to kiss each others’ hand, ring and finger. At Easter they can pick up some poor beggar and wash and kiss his feet. They can walk down the aisles dressed like a bride with two young guys in black holding up their gown. They can bless each other with church room odorizer. They are free to put on a show of queens, because as prelates they live a pure homo life.

The Pope and his gang at the Vatican  live like homopuritans, not homosexuals. They are not repressed homosexuals. They are all form and no body and their acts are only imitation ceremonial acts.

Clothes make the holy man. But behind those clothes is flesh, which sometimes feels the pull and tug of their mortality. The Pope does not always act rationally or in his best political interest. Why would he send out the message of a stern Polish Holy Father, condemning homosexuality in America and then plan his trip here so it ends up in San Francisco? Does he want to engage the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in a street fight? Does he want a pie in his face? Does he find us in the flesh so irresistible?

The Pope and his gang will not be shaken from their Homo Heights. The wimpish American bishops have again submitted to his authority. His place is secure.

But they are not secure in their place. Gay frightens them: it’s new and it’s free and it’s lustfully loving. They never had the gay option when they were young in Poland and now they want to bash it when they see it in the flesh.

And yet the Pope plans to plop down in the middle of it in San Francisco. Are we his last temptation?

Gay liberation represents almost the ultimate in Protestantism. We say you can love yourself and your friend and Jesus directly. You do not have to ask permission from the top men in the Society of Homos in order to love.

Like all mortals, the Pope and his gang are panicked by this new gay option. A world where you can be gay and don’t have to be homosexual; be sane and don’t have to be a sinner; be a body–a loving body–and don’t have to be a theologian–all this zaps their mind.

But if they don’t catch on soon to the winds of freedom, they might just get left behind when all the people take back their church for the love of Jesus and leave them behind, a company of forgotten old men.

© 2010 John Michael Vore and Firetrap Press. Originally published in Windy City Times in Jon-Henri Damski's JHD column, November 20, 1986. v1r3. Published as Schizo-file#30 in dead/queer/proud (Firetrap Press, 2002).