You have to see it to believe it
what do mystic texts and gay media have in common?
Mars resumed his march forward thorough Cancer: What’s been pissing you off lately? A couple days ago, Mars stationed direct and has now begun slowly slogging his way forward through Cancer. A few weeks ago I wrote about how his retrograde into and through Cancer was feeling for me. I talked about the value of focusing your efforts right around you, in your home and your neighborhood, the places where your anger and passion to improve things can get more mileage. I still think this is a good use of your time and energy.
I’ll also say that as Mars marches forward, he’ll be revisiting the places he recently fell backward through. This is one of those recurring features of astrology, the cycle, the potential for us to revisit recent and ancient history so that we can learn from it. What’s fallen apart for you lately and how did it trigger difficulty and tension for you? Was it righteous anger or, now that you’ve had some space, was it maybe less important than you felt at the time? It’s okay to apologize and to start fresh.
In this week’s newsletter:
A winding treatment of what the mystics have to say about teaching/knowledge
Many quotations from On Mysticism and Bernard McGinn
A little peek into my own experiences with coming out and learning about Gay™
Every week I promise myself I’m going to do a much better job of outlining and preparing and structuring these blogs so they are closer to “essay” and farther from “blog” (not to knock the blog form which I do ultimately love—it’s only in a blog that one can be truly unhinged—but I am trying to stretch my brain). This week, I partially succeeded, though, probably predictably, like a gas filling whatever oddly shaped container you pump it into, more time with my ideas just seems to have resulted in more unwieldiness. Oh well.
Enjoy this blog about some mystics who I’ve learned about, embodying beliefs, and how huge it has been in my life to know about prior generations of gay people living, dying, and, on occasion, having sex.
You’d have to see it to believe it.
One of the clearer memories I have from middle school, a warped and weird time in anyone’s life that is often first on the list to be suppressed entirely for pubescent trauma reasons, took place at a cafeteria lunch table.
I don’t know how the topic of “homosexuality” came up, but I assume it was not elegant. The scene as I can access it now starts with one friend, Max, commenting that he had a gay uncle who introduced him to some of his gay friends. The gay uncle lived in California and liked Max a lot. This all gave Max cultural cache. He had a point of access to Los Angeles and other places far away from our town with a population of 1,400 people. Not wanting to be completely outdone, another friend, Dustin, offered up that he also had a gay uncle. He didn’t live in California, but he apparently was very funny and had a lisp that Dustin was able to perform to great success. This was when he shared that even though most of the family knew this uncle was gay, he still introduced his partner as his roommate when he went to family holidays.
“I have a gay uncle,” I exclaimed, realizing it myself for the first time. “And,” I added, “I’ve also got a gay aunt!” I was stunned and my friends were not impressed. The conversation moved on.
It was the first time I realized that my uncle brought a man named Dan with him to family events because Dan was family. The same was true for my aunt who brought a woman named Charlotte. She was family.
Up to that point, whenever I’d crunched the numbers, I’d somehow decided that these two siblings of my mom’s just had really good friends they brought around. I thought their friends maybe would one day fall in love themselves, considering they both had reddish hair. All four of them sure seemed to understand each other in a meaningful way that I hadn’t ever been able to put my finger on. Reader: the connection they shared was being gay.
Let’s try to define what makes a “mystic”. If you spend even a little time reading about them, seemingly across traditions and eras, there are some obvious patterns that emerge as well as some confusing facets of the category that don’t ever seem to get less confusing. As much as the role of “mystic” has been around in most cultures for as long as we’ve had culture, it’s a fuzzy term.
My rough, premature definition of a mystic: a mystic is someone who uses internal ways of knowing to move closer to god. In the traditional sense, these are people who have moments of insight, imparted lessons that may or may not appear supernatural (they’re all supernatural, because they are revealed insights from elsewhere, they just don’t always have to involve levitation and stigmata). Mystics might or might not have a religious association. Christian Mystics are frequently Catholic, but not always. Regardless of their theism or lack thereof, they seek a way of knowing. This is where my interest in mystics comes from, a desire to gain “penetrating wisdom” or, perhaps, “organizing wisdom”. A window I can look through in order to make sense of a confusing life.
The more current association of the word “mystic” focuses on magical or “New Age” things. If not in the 2025 way that involves rose quartz for skin care and Tarot cards on iPhone apps, then in the Madame Blavatsky, Golden Dawn, occultist sense. This doesn’t come from nowhere and often these ways of seeing the world have roots in “real” mysticism. But they’re not the same. Where these forms (particularly those that have been made to support capital) fail is their tendency away from mystery. Where they seek simple answers, real mysticism requires mystery.
Because I wouldn’t want you relying just on my nascent understanding, I’ll share Evelynn Underhill’s definition of mysticism from her book Practical Mysticism: a little book for normal people. She says: “Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment.”
Underhill later goes on to say that the mystic is the person who, in their search for understanding, does not rush to tie experience down with analysis. She explains it with a metaphor of a hunter and a hare; a wisdom seeker is the hunter and the wisdom is the hare. Underhill says the typical person hunts the rabbit, catches it, kills it, cooks it, and eats it. In fact, the average person hardly recognizes the wild rabbit was once running through a field at all and skips straight to the end, to the point when the hare has been eaten and digested. The mystic on the other hand is content to consider the hunt, to question their perceptions and not rush. They live on God’s time. Chew your food slowly enough and you might really taste it.
How is someone supposed to approach mystical wisdom? How does someone gain unity with Reality™? Probably there are a million ways, but a lot of them look like meditation and spending time alone. Christians call it contemplative prayer. You might call it Zen Buddhism. People all over the world meditate in some way or another. What I’ve been thinking about this week has been the deeply physical nature of much of these practices. Prayer, meditation, silence. At first they may seem to take place in our heads, but is that true?
I can’t say that I have personally experienced a brush with the divine, not in the sense or to the degree that I’m talking about here. But I do see a thread connecting those experiences with some that I know well.
Hopefully you have experienced the feeling in nature, on a hike or sitting by flowing water, that you are a very small thing in a very lively web of other small and big things. The tingle that might start in your belly or heart or at the base of your throat. It makes me think of the beginning of a smile, maybe, an inward unfolding.
I’ve also felt it when I’ve read a really excellent poem, a kind of sublime recognition of shared experience. Maybe when listening to music at some point you have felt shaken out of yourself, fundamentally different and yet unchanged. Obviously it’s not a feeling you can put into words—you know this if you’ve ever tried to share a song that is sacred to you but barely registers to the recipient. That’s the whole point, these sensations can only be gestured at and either recognized or not. Still, if you can’t describe it then you can perhaps relay what brought you to it.
I already knew I was gay by the time I realized my mom had two gay siblings.
I was still about five years from coming out officially, five years from the moment I would update my Facebook profile to say “Interested in: Men” and, when that didn’t draw much attention from anyone in my life, the moment when I changed my Facebook cover photo to a rainbow flag, waving in the wind. But I knew I was gay by the moment at that lunch table. I had found erotica online, read steamy fan fiction about Harry Potter and Ron Weasley exploring each other’s bodies. There were some very interesting situations using the time turner that helped me realize what I really was interested in. And it wasn’t Hermione.
After the Harry Potter erotica website was shut down for copyright infringement (some of us have been feuding with Jo Rowling for a VERY long time), it wasn’t long before I was looking for any other shred of gay media. Obviously, yes, porn. But also message boards, It Gets Better videos on YouTube, and a bare but important “Gay and Lesbian” section on the Netflix “Watch Now” service1. Slowly I began to build a conception of “gay” that I could fit inside of, hoping some combination of these fictional, confessional, and memoiristic accounts could give me the understanding I needed.
What that moment did for me more than anything was to ask the question: what can a gay life look like? It’s funny, yes, that it took me so long to recognize that there were gay people in my immediate family. But I just didn’t know. It’s easy to not understand, not even recognize, something you haven’t ever seen before or been taught to see. There’s a certain amount of familiarity and repetition that helps secure a possibility in your head as just that, one possibility among other possibilities.
Rituals help direct people toward unnamable experiences. When words fail, actions might suffice. That seems to me to be the premise of many ritualistic elements of religion. “I can’t explain this, so let me show you instead.” This is a risky way of teaching, because within experience there are infinite ways to understand something. To the risk averse, words and dogma feel like security. I think that particular security is illusory and that words are just as prone to error, if not moreso, than these ritual actions and inarticulable means of knowing. Any Bible is subject to quite a lot of interpretation.
Growing up going to Catholic Mass every Sunday for about eighteen years, I learned a lot about ritual movements. It’s a tired joke at this point, that, to the uninitiated, the sequence of standing, sitting, kneeling, holding hands, and call and response of a Mass is confusing. It took a while before I realized that was the case, because I learned it so organically and from such a young age. The sequence of movements and attention in the Mass is a ritual I know well, well enough that it’s deeper than knowing. It’s physically embedded. This is true for most people I know who were raised Catholic.
With such frequent practice in a ritualistic state, why did I not ever “approach the divine?” Why did I not ever experience the real? It was almost two decades after all. I had plenty of meaningful realizations during church, meditative states that I reached through a combination of teen sleepiness, the overwhelming presence of incense, and an active imagination. But this didn’t bring me into union with Reality. If all it took was rhythmic ritualistic movement, Catholics the world over would be keeling over in mystical ecstasy on a regular basis, but that doesn’t happen. There’s another necessary piece.
I can think of only one personal experience where I might have stumbled upon something like that approach toward the divine, where I accidentally uncovered that other component of mystical contemplation.
I don’t know exactly when it was, only that it must have been some time between middle school and when I came out in my junior year of high school. I was still in the closet to nearly everyone and certainly everyone in my family. But I remember sitting in Mass at the Catholic summer camp that my mother managed. I don’t remember if there were campers or if this was a retreat service, but I remember obsessing over whether it was time to tell her that I was gay. I don’t know why that day the question was so loud for me, but it was. I was moving through the Mass by memory, I’m sure, because my focus was so obsessively on the question of whether or not this was the day to do it.
At some point, maybe while the priest was giving his homily, I stared at the light coming through the large stained glass window behind the altar. Zoning out into the colored light streaming through the glass was nothing new, but my internal state was. Something shifted. I felt a sensation that it would be okay to do it that day. I knew that in reality, at the deepest levels, there was nothing wrong with who I was. I think this was something like a new way of understanding.
Incidentally, I did not act on that understanding. I waited at least a few years, but it ultimately went fine and now I’m a gay adult writing about prayer on the Internet.
The reason I share this story (believe me, I am out of my comfort zone in doing so) is because I think it illustrates an interesting dynamic between the physicality of ritual and the internal mental state. In this instance, I had an exceptionally one-track mind. The lion’s share of my attention in those years went toward seeking out gay media so I could soak up its potential. I’d go so far as to say that on most days of my early teens I was internally repeating something like “am I gay? do I tell anyone? what am I going to do?” to a degree that it may as well have been a mantra. On that day, the intensity of the mantra, the physicality of the Mass, the visuals of the light in the window, and whatever else (God?) conspired to connect me with a significant truth.
In his book On Mysticism, Simon Critchley argues that, “the real test of warrant for the authenticity of a particular mystic’s account of personal transformation” is “whether it is transformative for others. Its authority lies in its capacity to bring others in. Mysticism speaks to and indeed requires an audience, a receptive, interested, even devoted audience.” When I think about my early explorations and consumptions of gay accounts, gay literature, and even gay “content,” that product that only exists on the Internet, the witch’s brew of posts, confessional poetry, shiny objects, and advertisements, I think about conversion.
Here’s a representative but incomplete list of these transformative artifacts:
The aforementioned Harry Potter erotica
Glee and all the Tumblr posts featuring Kurt + Blaine
The Facebook profiles of “gay kids from other schools” I heard about
The 2008 film Milk
Gay YouTube, including Tyler Oakley, the British ones, Davey Wavey, etc.
U.K. Skins
Logo TV’s 1 Girl, 5 Gays
An Australian blogger who wrote sex toy reviews
Kathy Griffin’s My Life on the D List
All the girls in my grade who oscillated between saying they were Bi, Lesbian, or Straight
It is a big reach to put this discussion of mystic texts that evoke spiritual conversion against the ephemera of early oughts gay experience. That they’re equivalent is not even the argument I want to be making, really. But it’s true that the first thing I thought of when I read Critchley’s argument that a mystic’s texts, their theology, has to be understood primarily through reception was my experience with gay media and gay performance.
“Mysticism speaks to and indeed requires an audience, a receptive, interested, even devoted audience.” This piece is key. When I think about myself at the age of 10 or 13 or 17, I think about a boy who was devoted wholly to figuring out what he was supposed to do with this identity. My devotions changed over time, certainly. When I was 10 that devotion was purely physical and intuitive, not born out of a response to figure out how to fit in. By the time I was 13, it was all about fitting in. By 17, it was something else, swinging between extremes and trying to figure out where to direct the anger over how much time and energy it took. Over the course of those years I was transformed by these “texts” and performances over and over and over.
A confession: I have occasionally felt envious of the gay kids who came after me. They grew up in a country with legal gay marriage and, generally, Internet service that would connect them to things like Drag Race and gay TikTok. Streaming services make it feasible to access gay classics like Paris is Burning as well as truly toothless and life affirming gay romances like Love, Simon or Heartstopper.
Of course, the pendulum swings back around and, having picked up speed, it’s coming in hot. We are feeling the consequences of a liberal political party that clocks changes in culture and hangs their hat on that change instead of codifying legal protections and solving basic problems of access to food, health, housing, and security. When a carton of eggs costs twenty dollars, one of the political scapegoats will always be the queers.
I am not envious of the young gay kids now. I feel for them, fear for them, and can only do my best to live a life that helps expand their possibilities, whether that be within the system we are currently constrained to or by helping to envision new systems, better systems, queerer systems.
Bernard McGinn, a scholar on the topic of mysticism, particularly within the Christian tradition, says: “mysticism (as the mystics have insisted) is more than a matter of unusual sensations, but essentially comprises new ways of knowing and loving based on states of awareness in which God becomes present in our inner acts, not as an object to be grasped, but as the direct and transforming center of life.” In this sense, any of these alternative ways of knowing that we’ve looked at, whether they be spiritual, artistic, musical, or natural are mystical. In this sense, the way a young person feels their way forward, stumbles toward their queerness, is mystical.
I’m sympathetic to the argument that there are risks to an overly permeable membrane when it comes to categorizing experiences as “mystical” or not. We live in a society and words must mean something. But if there is any instance, any concept that feeds on permeability and impossible, paradoxical expansion, it seems that mysticism would be it. Beyond that, mystics from around the world have proven over and over that this experience is hardly ever the same for any two people. We all may aspire to floating together in the oceanic feeling, but it’s unlikely that we’ll enter the water from the same shore. Identifying and cultivating access points to mystical experience outside the confines of organized religion can only help us in this moment.
Again, I turn to Critchley. He says, “Mystical writing does not reflect experience, it produces experience.” Anyone who has read the work of artists with a mystical bent, whether they be expressly religious like Evelynn Underhill or more secular like Annie Dillard, would agree. When you encounter a transcendent truth, it does not register as reportage, it registers in your body as experience. I think the same could be said about much queer writing. Queer writing does not always reflect experience, but it certainly produces it.
If that’s true, if queer writing, art, even content, is productive, then it’s a project worth doing. It’s a project of building potential and altering the schemas that we work within in the first place. This leads to change, has to lead to change, practical change, through the conversion of people in seemingly hopeless situations into people with hope. Never have I ever transformed my life or shaken off social shackles without hope. It’s a fragile thing, a desperate attempt to try and produce hope in others, but I don’t know any other way.
Thanks for reading. There’s a lot that I wasn’t able to fit into this blog. There are a lot of rabbit holes that, better explored, would probably improve the writing and create a more cogent sense of what I’m trying to understand, but I’m not there yet. Here are a few areas that I’ll have to explore in the future:
I need to better understand where we have seen queerness in the history of mystical writing.
There’s something about “hope” that clearly needs expansion. I think about how this is addressed in Cruising Utopia and Imagining Real Utopias and really any project that tries to engage with “utopia”.
Religion, (pseudo)mysticism, and ritual have also been used to restrict, limit, and shut down queer movements. I don’t think this disqualifies them as forces for hope, but it’s worth better understanding and articulating.
What’s going on with capitalism here? Probably a lot.
Some other things to check out:
A poem by Walt Whitman, who is gay and a mystic.
Late to the party, this deep dive on the Murdoch family was satisfying and dystopic.
This video of Dr. Orna Guralnik of Couples Therapy fame. None of the questions or answers are so groundbreaking, but I really love to hear her articulations, especially the futility of litigating facts in a relationship.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
Some day I will tell the story about when I tried watching a gay movie on the family account, couldn’t get it to load on our rural Internet service, and then panicked to see that it was featured at the top of the family “Continue Watching?” list. The rest of the story involves a panicked phone call to Netflix customer service and a very confused adult on the other end of the line.