Jim Kepner: Jim Kepner was founder of the International Gay and Lesbian Archives and co-founder of ONE Institute. A major pioneer of the Gay movement as well as a founder of Gay Studies, he died in 1997. His most recent book is ROUGH NEWS, DARING VIEWS: PIONEER GAY PRESS JOURNALISM IN THE 1950s, published by Haworth Press.
This book is not for everybody. Anglo-American Philosopher Gerald Heard, whom I wrote about in Mark Thompson's book Gay Spirit (or else his amanuensis Jack Jones) finished the manuscript of this book shortly before Heard's 1971 death and had it delivered surreptitiously to Dorr Legg at ONE Inc. to publish. Since Legg copywrited it, some bibliographers assumed mistakenly that he was the author. Science fiction fans, radical faeries, and those transsexually inclined should look into it, but be warned that it is frustratingly difficult to read. It is the story of an initiate's introduction to a more than quirky, walled-off gay utopia hidden in Uraguay, with androgynous illustrations posed by Heard disciple Paul Mathison (the exquisite blond in Kenneth Anger's fiim, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.)
Until Professor John Cody at the University of San Francisco began digging into it, and into the life and works of Heard generally, I'd never managed to read more than 20 pages. I had assumed it was written, very badly, by one of Heard's young disciples. At Cody's urging (he's working on a book about Heard) I forced my way into it. Finally, about page 160, the writing suddenly became lucid, and I went back to the start and found it well-written after all, though certainly gnomic. Under the pen-name D. B. Vest, Heard had written several provocative articles for ONE Magazine and ONE Institute Quarterly of Homophile Studies, which I edited.
This volume, portraying a future homosexual utopia (which I happen to find distinctly unattractive), takes off where the article “What's Next for Homos” left off. Heard, a profound and witty mystic with encyclopaedic knowledge, met several times with some of us homophile activists during the 1950s and ‘60s, urging us to seriously consider the negative psychic-karmic consequences of our tactics and where our movement hoped finally to go. He favored working behind the scenes in ad hoc groups rather than the confrontational approach, which he insisted would ultimately produce a backlash.
Heard came to believe that gays (he preferred the term isophyls) were the evolutionary wave of the future, in a society in which job-specialization and gender dichotomy had begun to become dangerously archaic, and play increasingly creative. A British lecturer in history and anthropology, who worked with everyone who was prominent in British intellectual life, a very fey dandy in his youth, Heard came to the U.S. with Aldous Huxley, experimented with metaphysics and psychedelics and exerted great influence on Christopher Isherwood, the Vedanta Society, UCLA Professor Evelyn Hooker, Stravinsky, the Counter Culture, and many others. He was a breathtaking conversationalist whose dozens of books sometimes lack the free-ranging excitement of his talks.
This volume, whether written by him or by one of his young disciples, is a strange epitaph, and, I think, not a very fitting one.
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