The Need for a Sense of Pride and Purpose

Over the past 48 years (since the Stonewall Riots launched the gay community's Civil Rights movement), we have come a long way.  Though we have more rights today than we have ever had before as a community (we can openly serve in the military, we can marry whomever we choose, and we have several human rights organizations defending us and advocating for our continued rights in the political sphere), the damage that was done to our community in the past cannot be forgotten.  We were demonized.  That smear campaign was so successful that it made many of us hate ourselves and each other, but worse than all that, our contribution to society was erased from the pages of history.

Just after I earned my third degree as a Wiccan High Priest in 2011, I recognized a need to make traditional witchcraft more inclusive of gay men.  At first, I expressed this need by asking one simple question.  "Where is the romantic and sexual relationship between the Horned God and his male lover?"  The Goddess has been portrayed in a Lesbian relationship since the classical period.  Diana's female lovers are as much a part of her myth as the dogs with which she hunts.  However, the Horned God of Witches was not portrayed the same way.

From time to time, witches might pay lip service to the pansexual or omnisexual nature of a god like Pan, but it is quickly brushed over, and then they quickly turn back to his sexual encounters with the Goddess and follow their relationship through the Wheel of the Year.  There was no commonly accepted and celebrated stable and ongoing loving, sexual, or romantic relationship between the God and his male lover, and I wanted to know why.  (More on that in a future post.)

This one question led me to do what I did best: research.  I began studying the Horned God and the many faces that have worn that title for various traditions.  I studied ancient mythology and folklore, and I began reading about the male mysteries.  (Thank you R. J. Stewart!)  Eventually, my research began to coalesce.  I found a book called The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relationships in Human Society by James Neill, and his bibliography led me even deeper down the rabbit hole.

What I found from reading Mr. Neill's book (and countless others from his extensive bibliography) was that men who exclusively loved men had a very rich and beautiful history of being magical practitioners for the tribes they served all the way back before the dawn of civilization.  Though Western Society had attempted to wipe us from the pages of history, and though that campaign was relatively successful all things considered, there were still tattered threads that could be followed to help us reclaim what we as a subculture had lost.

This pride in our history and the sense of purpose it can give us as men who love men is sorely needed by gay and bisexual men today.  We live in a world where being "feminine" is a bad thing.  Men are still ashamed to throw or do ANYTHING like a girl.  Even women use that as an insult against men.  Men who grow their hair long are judged.  If a man knits, sews, or crochets, he is viewed to be "odd" at best by mainstream society.

Even gay men judge other gay men harshly if they are too feminine.  "If I wanted to date a girl, I would be straight," "No fems," "Straight-acting here" are all phrases that are casually thrown around on gay dating sites.  It's really very damaging, but without a sense of pride or purpose, how can we fault each other for this particular transgression, especially given the antagonism leveled against us by mainstream society?

Something has to be done, and, personally, I believe the answer is to empower gay men and to give them back their sense of purpose.