Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture

Description

A seminal work on queer spirituality and historical interpretation Arthur Evans was one of the earliest stalwarts of the gay liberation movement and one of the founders of New York's Gay Activist Alliance. Born in 1942, Arthur Evans studied at Brown University and received his doctorate from Columbia University (in philosophy). While at Brown, he and friends formed the Brown Freethinkers Society, describing themselves as 'militant atheists' with the objective of combating the harmful effects of organized religion. At Columbia, he was instrumental in the founding of the Student Homophlie League, one of the few campus gay organizations to precede the Stonewall uprising. He is the author of a 1997 3-volume work on queer perspectives on philosophy entitled "Critique of Patriarchal Reason" of which Volume 1 has been published. "Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture" ("WAGC") is one of the seminal works of the queer spirituality movement. The book opens with a recounting of the May 30, 1431 burning alive of a young French girl, a transvestite, named Joan of Arc. The book, while primarily "an exposé of the role of homophobia in the European witch hunts" is actually much more than that. It offers a thoroughly researched and well documented chronicle of the Christian Church's genocidal murders of heretics, women and queer folk, moving from the medieval near equation of heresy with sodomy and vice-versa ("How can you call me a Cathar - I, a married man with children!") through the suppression of same-sexed intimacy amongst the third world victims of European colonization through to what was the present day (which is to say, the 1970's). What the author had to say thirty years ago is still relevant and appropriate today, though some have taken issue with his justification of the use of violence in over-coming oppression. A careful reading, though, shows this not to be `justification' but simply `explanation' of why and how the then nascent gay movement might understandably have (but didn't) become violent in view of the fact that "Christian violence was responsible for the birth of the modern nation-state ..." and as witnessed by the contemporaneous rise of the radical fundamentalist Christian right and the presidential election of Ronald Reagan. The author of "WAGC" shared with many of us then the sentiment that "the other shoe was about to drop" and the decade of openness birthed by the Stonewall uprising would be ended, likely in a hail of bullets. Recommend reading for anyone interested in the history of the Christian Church, queer spirituality or queer history.