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.
Like Randy Conner's Blossom of Bone (Harper Collins, 1993), this book aims to find the essence of gay spirit in worldwide myths and ritual. Will Roscoe's use of the tenn queer is odious to many, but some examples give the term its proper perjorative cast. He considers the Gay urge to be universal, yet shows that different cultures shape the expression of gay spirit, often in ways that repell most of us today, and many today refuse to relate their gayness to spiritual qualities.
Roscoe describes growing up and coming out in Missoula, Montana, illuminating his experience by his worldwide collection of myths intended to serve as guides to gays today. He shows a bias toward “sissies” and transsexuals, and avoids Judaeo-Christian themes other than Morton Smith's Secret Gospel of Mark account of Jesus' intimacy with a youth, presumably Lazarus, whom he'd resurrected.
In almost the same words Randy Connor used, Roscoe notes that gays historically fall into three main types, with one predominating in most cultures: (1) those with a cross-gender quality, such as Native American berdache or today's queens, transvestites and transsexuals; (2) inter-generational relationships, reflected mythically and anthropologically in initiatory rites; and (3) relationships of equals, which Roscoe classes as Divine Twins—actually only one egalitarian style. He largely ignores warrior-buddy traditions, and skips relationships based on class, race or status differences, but notes that some gays are versatile. He found it hard to accept boy lovers, honored in Greek, Arabic and Japanese writing, or the self-castrated cults such as the Galli of ancient Rome, servants of the goddess Cybele, and the contemporary Hijras of India.
Roscoe credits Carl Jung's expioring of mythology as “race memory,” adding that we take our applicable myths not only from classic Greece and Rome, and tribal peoples (to which he gives most space) but also from popular films, comic strips and songs. A perceptive book, it leaves a fertile field for others to plow, as I think Conner did more creatively, treating the varied spiritual roles of gays more than applicable myths. For writers who attempt so wide a treatment ofg ay concerns, Connor is undogmatic. He asserts that homosexual impulses are expressed in the three chief forms mentioned above (I would expand that), though he concentrates largely on cross-gender sacredotal functions. The richness of his study (even if some assertions seem weakly supported) leaves me quite jealous of this book, though as our literature expands, it's not the first time I've felt that way. Yet his approach is very different from that taken in my Gay Spirit manuscript. Arguing that spiritual roies are inherent in gay nature, he, like the others, pays little attention to materials from Judaeo-Christian or Muslim backgrounds.
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