Klee’s “Insula Dulcamara” (1938)

Paul Klee on intuition in art

According to Paul Klee, the technique of the brush stroke is a great deal, but the crucial factor in painting is intuition. “We construct and construct,” Klee wrote in a Bauhaus prospectus, “and yet intuition is still a good thing. A considerable amount can be done without it, but not all. There is plenty of room for exact research in art, but there is no substitute for intuition.”

“Art unwittingly plays a game with the ultimate realities, but nevertheless arrives at them… The formal cosmos so closely resembles the Creation that a mere breath is sufficient to bring to life the expression of religious experience and of religion itself.”

From Paul Klee, by Will Grohmann (Collins: Fontana Pocket Libary of Great Art, Amsterdam, 1958).

Reclaiming Our Spiritual Legacy as Transgendered People
By Pauline Park
18 June 2000

I was asked to speak on spirituality and the transgender community. It seems to me that the connection is an intimate one, far closer than we may realize.

For we as transgendered and gender-variant people lie at the interstices not only of the binary of sex and gender, but also of the binary of the sacred and the profane. In contemporary North American society, we are viewed by some as being — of all people — perhaps the farthest removed from God — at least the God of the Christian fundamentalists. And yet, on this continent a mere three hundred years ago, our forebears, far from being a despised minority, were regarded as intermediaries between heaven and earth, uniquely constituted by their transgendered nature to serve as interlocutors between the human and the divine.

In a cruel irony, the European conquest made transgendered people special targets of prosecution because they were viewed as particularly offensive to Christian strictures — at least as interpreted by conquistadores of the 17th century and other colonizers who followed them. I can well imagine — here on the island that the Algonquin called Manahatta — transgendered shamans exercising a role of spiritual leadership, not only respected but revered by their compatriots. And yet, on this terrain that was to them sacred ground, we now find ourselves cast down from the realm of the sacred to that of the profane.

One of the greatest challenges facing us as we construct a transgender community and catalyze a transgender political movement is to recapture and revivify the sacred in our own nature and then to communicate our most deeply felt spirituality to our contemporaries. We cannot afford to cede the territory of ‘faith and family’ to those who would seek to erase us from the history of this continent. We would make a fatal error, I would suggest, in all too readily falling into a civil libertarian discourse of the ’separation of church and state,’ conceding religion and spirituality to the most conservative and regressive elements in our society.

Regardless of whether we are People of the Book (Christian, Jewish or Muslim) or profess a non-Western faith — or whether we embrace pre-Christian pagan spiritual traditions — we must work to gain recognition of the validity and integrity of our spiritual lives.  And we must reinscribe ourselves in the narrative histories of our peoples and reclaim our legacy as spiritual beings.

shaman’s drum

It was an honor for me to address the congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church of New York (MCC-NY) on Stonewall Sunday 2000 as we commemorated the birth of the modern movement for the liberation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people. This is the text of my address to the congregation, which was published in the November/December 2001 issue of PersuAsian (Issue 10, “Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Spirituality“), the news magazine of the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY).

Hillary Mann Leverett, apologist for murder

Flynt & Hillary Mann Leverett are the voice of Iran in Washington — not the voice of the Iranian people, mind you, but the voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran — apologists for the repression, torture, and murder of the Iranian people by a tyrannical regime; as such, they are the very worst sort of self-appointed ‘experts.’

Before the violent suppression of the Green Movement by the Revolutionary Guards on the orders of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei after he stole the presidential election last year, the Leveretts were little more than an embarassment; but since the imprisonment, torture and murder of unarmed Iranian citizens by the Leveretts’ friends in power, the Leveretts are looking more like apologists for authoritarianism and murder.

Neither Flynt nor Hillary have any discernible credentials on Iranian affairs, other than their close friendship with the mullahs who run the country. True, both were once on the policy planning staff of the U.S. Department of State, but Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of State and once Flynt Leverett’s boss, has publicly questioned the origins of the fax that the Leveretts cite as evidence that the Iranian government was eager to reach a ‘grand bargain’ with the United States over nuclear proliferation. The provenance of the ‘Grand Bargain fax’ that the Leveretts tirelessly cite as conclusive evidence of the pacific intentions of the Iranian regime has been questioned even by the editor of Kayhan, an Iranian newspaper under the supervision of the Supreme Leader’s office, as Lee Smith points out (Grand Bargainers, Planet Iran.com, 2.24.10). “We are even a bit suspicious that the Swiss ambassador wrote that fax himself,” the newspaper’s editor has said. In other words, the central piece of evidence in the (very weak) case that the Leveretts make for a policy of engagement with Iran may well be a hoax, and the Leveretts themselves (who have close connections with the regime) may very well know that it’s a hoax.

Another senior policy maker from the same administration in which the Leveretts served, Richard Haass, has explicitly disavowed the Leveretts’ rosy view of the regime, writing in Newsweek in January 2010 that “we can no longer remain on the sidelines in the struggle for regime change in Iran.” Contrary to the Leveretts’ insistence that there is no evidence that the election was stolen, Haass (who has enormously more sense as well as experience in foreign policy than the two Leveretts put together) puts it quite simply: “The authorities overreached in their blatant manipulation of last June’s presidential election, and then made matters worse by brutally repressing those who protested.”

In stark contrast to the clear analysis of Richard Haass, the Leveretts offer clever non-statements that are impossible to call outright falsehoods, such as Hillary’s declaration that “It was eminently plausible that Ahmadinejad could win the election,” as Leverett stated in an interview with Charlie Rose on March 29. Such a statement is clever because it does not commit either Hillary or Flynt Leverett to an explicit assertion that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually won the presidential election last year, but nonetheless creates the impression that he did, though the Leveretts offer no evidence to support such assertions, other than referencing public opinion polls that they claim indicate popular support for Ahmadinejad both before and after the election at levels that ‘track’ with the vote tally announced by the government in the wake of the stolen election. But no credible public opinion survey can be conducted under an authoritarian regime when that same regime is imprisoning, torturing and executing those who dispute the poll results.

The nicest thing that one could say of them are that Flynt & Hillary Mann Leverett are ‘influence peddlers,’ as Lee Smith of Planet Iran.com called them, trading on their connections with the regime in order to advance their own peculiar and entirely self-interested agenda. As Smith points out in “Grand Bargainers,” the ‘background dinners’ which the Leveretts present as a kind of salon,” help to generate business for an energy and consulting firm called Stratega, whose CEO happens to be Hillary Mann Leverett.” In other words, the Leveretts have a direct financial stake in the business they generate with U.S. and Western companies operating in Iran and which they promote through their public statements on the current state of affairs there — hardly a disinterested analysis of the politics of the Islamic Republic.

Flynt Leverett, shameless influence peddler

But the Leveretts are shameless in promoting an image of a benign regime with a smiling and popularly elected president as they take their talking points from press releases issued by the Iranian embassy in Washington and defend with as much gusto as they can the regime that has murdered its own people in a so far successful attempt to cling to power. The Leveretts’ key source of information about Iranian government and politics is apparently their co-author, Seyed Mohammad Marandi, “who has emerged as the Iranian government’s chief spokesperson in the English-language media,” as award-winning journalist Omid Memarian has pointed out. The reliance of the Leveretts on Marandi as a news source is no more credible than Judith Miller’s reliance on Scooter Libby — Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff — as her primary news source for stories about the nuclear threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime, plastered on the front page of the New York Times as the Bush administration beat the drums for war in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

It is important for me as an openly transgendered woman of Asian birth to point out that the Islamic Republic of Iran has also executed gay teenagers for having engaged in consensual sex — acts of unjustified judicial murder that are not only profoundly immoral and that have prompted international condemnation, but which would seem to belie Ahmadinejad’s assertion that there are no homosexuals in Iran. The problem is not merely the homophobic Ahmadinejad, of course; the power of the president is limited by that of the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, who cannot be challenged in any election or removed by the judiciary or the people. Paradoxically, his predecessor, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, actually issued a fatwah approving of sex reassignment surgery (SRS) for transsexuals in Iran; but the logic behind it was not at all transgender-supportive; Khomeini issued the fatwah because he was persuaded that surgical procedures could be used to change gay men into heterosexual women. Obviously, the fatwah was based on a number of serious misconceptions about sexual orientation and gender identity, but even though SRS is officially sanctioned in Iran, the reality of the lives of transsexual and transgendered people remains bleak, as portrayed in the documentary “Be Like Others,” about transgender life in Iran, where the regime of the mullahs persecutes transgendered and gender-variant people despite the option of SRS available to at least some.

What is particularly shameful about the Leveretts is that they give a bad name to those who argue against the growing drumbeat of war against Iran; while it is absolutely clear to me that the regime is incapable of reform as long as Khamenei and his cohort are in power, I also oppose military action against Iran by the United States or by Israel, which would only strengthen the regime now in power in Tehran. But neither the government of the United States nor the government of any other state can make effective policy unless it is informed by an accurate and probing analysis of the situation in Iran, including a comprehensive documentation of the massive human rights abuses committed by the regime; the influence-peddling Leveretts, trading on their connections with the mullahs to make money off the misery and oppression of the Iranian people, can do nothing but misinform policy-making.

Isfahan: Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque

First North American LGBTQ Muslim Conference Held in New York
By Pauline Park
Lesbian & Gay New York (LGNY)
3 June 1999

Think “Islam and homosexuality.” The mind immediately conjures up images of a gay man in Iran being stoned to death by an angry mob while an imam fulminates against the abomination of men who lie with men and women who lie with women. Such images capture part of the reality, but they also render invisible the lives of queer Muslims and the complexity of their struggle.

Certainly, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission have amply documented the horrendous record of human rights abuses against queer people in Muslim countries. Honan, the exiled Iranian gay rights group, has estimated that over 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed — some stoned to death, others burned alive — since the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan last year, scores of accused homosexuals have apparently been killed by having brick walls
collapse on them or by being thrown from tall buildings or mountaintops. But behind the veil of clichéd images of Islamic fundamentalism, a movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (LGBTQ) Muslims is beginning to coalesce.

The Al-Fatiha Foundation convened the First North American Conference for LGBTQ Muslims and Friends, “Creating a Community,” here in New York Memorial Day weekend. Conference participants demonstrated the geographic and demographic diversity of the queer Muslim community, with blond-haired and blue-eyed European Americans mingling with olive-skinned Americans and Europeans of Arab and South Asian descent. Among the 60 or so attendees, there were practicing Muslims, including recent converts, non-observant individuals raised Muslim but alienated from their faith, as well as representatives of other faiths.

Al-Fatiha is an international organization founded in 1997 to provide a safe space for LGBTQ Muslims to share individual experiences and institutional resources, and help them reconcile their sexual orientation and/or gender identity with their faith. This last task is not made easy by passages in the Quran that seem to contain explicit proscriptions against homosexuality and cross-dressing. Interpreting such Quranic passages was the subject of a rather intense debate at the conference. Even Al-Fatiha’s founder, Faisal Alam, admits that he himself has not fully reconciled his sexuality and his faith.

“But when you face God and the Prophet on the day of judgment, the first question he’ll ask is not whether you are gay or how many sex partners you had, but did you believe in me?” Alam declared. “Male homosexuality in the Quran is conceptualized in heterosexual terms, and those Quranic proscriptions on homosexuality can be understood in the patriarchal context in which they were conceived,” Dr. Ghazala Anwar argued, “hence women and gay men have common cause in a feminist re-interpretation of Islam.”

Anwar was critical of the selective way in which fundamentalist governments had implemented traditional Islamic law. “Under sharia law, due process requires that four males witness anal penetration in order to make it subject to prosecution, which would make it practically impossible to prove,” Anwar said. “But in the contemporary Muslim world, people have forgotten about such provisions for due process.” Anwar also noted that the punishment of stoning someone to death was derived from sharia law and is not mentioned in the Quran itself. Anwar said that both Islamic fundamentalists and progressives were selective in quoting from the Quran on the subject of homosexuality and transgender, and that both had to develop a more rigorous methodology for interpreting scripture.

On a panel on interfaith perspectives on homosexuality, Will Berger, representing Dignity (the organization for LGBT Catholics), challenged literal interpretations of scripture. “Sometimes we just have to say that scripture is wrong,” he argued, citing the example of the Biblical justification of slavery. The panel found consensus on the need to recognize the full humanity of those in the religious Right opposed to LGBT equality. “Love well those who are your enemies right now, because in a few years, they will be your friends,” urged Dr. Louie Crew, who 25 years ago founded Integrity for lesbian and gay Episcopalians and described the progress the group has made since then. “A victory that diminishes your enemy is no victory.”

On a panel on the progressive interfaith movement, Surina Khan, a research analyst at Political Research Associates who studies authoritarian and racists movements in the U.S. said, “We need to be careful not to demonize the followers in [the religious right] movement, most of whom are sincere.” Khan suggested that the movement’s leaders were manipulating their followers.

A discussion on the merits of establishing a gay mosque sparked lively debate across a number of faiths represented. Donald Maher of the Spiritual Rainbow talked of the need to minister to lesbian and gay Catholics within the church, while Berger of Dignity and Rabbi Robert Young of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah spoke enthusiastically about the special energy that comes from having an LGBT-specific worship space. Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi, described the work of the Jerusalem Open House, an LGBT community center that seeks to meet the needs of Muslim and Christian Arabs as well as Jews.

More informal and intimate discussion sessions also addressed the lives of queer Muslims in the US and abroad. In a women’s discussion group, for example, one young Pakistani-born lesbian told of how she was pursuing a master’s degree in part because she needed an excuse to avoid being married, and said only half in jest that she would probably end up with a Ph.D. A first-generation immigrant mother expressed the need for a Muslim P-FLAG because non-Muslim parents could not fully understand the religious and cultural context in which she was struggling to be supportive
of her transsexual daughter’s transition. A transgendered Irish Catholic convert to Islam told of his concern for his children should his involvement with a queer Muslim group become known in his small Muslim community in Florida. On a more hopeful note, an African American lesbian told of how she had found a progressive mosque in New Jersey in which she could be “out” even to the female imam.

In Arabic, Al-Fatiha means “the Opening,” and refers to the opening passage of the Quran; but the organization’s name may refer to a different kind of opening as well, expressing the hope that Al-Fatiha may begin to open the heart of Islam to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Muslims
everywhere.

Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque (interior)

For further information contact:
Al-Fatiha Foundation,
212.752.3188

Arab & Persian LBT Women & Friends Gathering
(718.596.0342, x35)

Gay & Lesbian Arab Society (GLAS)
http://www.leb.net/glas
Jerusalem Open House, 617.247.8420,
http://www.poboxes.com/gayj

South Asian Lesbian & Gay Association (SALGA)
212.358.5132

Al-Fatiha is an international organization dedicated to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (LGBTQ) Muslims & their friends!

Al-Fatiha Foundation
Tel./Fax: (212) 752-3188
405 Park Avenue, Suite 1500
New York, NY 10022
http://www.al-fatiha.org

Patrick Cheng’s mother reads a statement in Chinese in support of her son and the LGBT/queer API community at the QAPI press conference in Chinatown on Jan. 30.  At left: lead organizers Irene Tung & Aries Liao.

NYAGRA statement on the participation of LGBT/queer APIs in the 2010 Chinese lunar new year parade in Chinatown
Pauline Park, chair
30 January 2010

On February 21, a contingent of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) or ‘queer’ Asians and Pacific Islanders (APIs) will participate in the annual Chinese lunar new year parade in New York’s Chinatown for the first time. The New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) — a transgender advocacy organization founded in 1998 — is proud to join Q-Wave, the Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY), Barangay, and a host of organizations in co-sponsoring the LGBT contingent in the parade. On behalf of our members, as chair of NYAGRA, I would especially like to acknowledge and thank Aries Liao and Irene Tung of Q-Wave for spearheading this historic initiative.

I would also like to suggest that it is important for us as LGBT/queer APIs to address the biggest misconception in API communities — namely, that we are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered because we’ve been hanging around white people too much. The implicit assumption behind that misconception is one of a viral model of gender identity and sexual orientation. The slogan of Queer Nation was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.” When it comes to homosexuality and transgender, the truth is that we have been here — in China and in every other Asian or Pacific Island society — since time immemorial.

China has homoerotic and proto-transgenderal traditions going back centuries. The ‘passion of the cut sleeve‘ (duan xiu) — the love of the Han dynasty Emperor Ai (27 BC-1 AD) — for his male favorite, Dong Xian — is the source of the Chinese euphemism for homosexuality (’cut sleeve’). The other popular Chinese euphemism for homosexuality — the ‘half-eaten peach‘ — goes back even further, to the Zhou dynasty Duke Ling of Wei (534-403 BC) and his male lover, Mixi Zia. While it is true that contemporary LGBT identities are of recent vintage, it is equally true that there were people in every pre-modern Asian or Pacific Islander society who were like us in important respects and whom we would call lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered.

So when we join the Chinese lunar new year parade in Chinatown on Feb. 21 as the first LGBT contingent in that parade, we are simply reclaiming our rightful place in our communities of origin and reinscribing ourselves in the dominant narratives of Asian and Asian American cultures. My message for non-LGBT participants in the parade who are shocked or confused by our presence is this: we are you and you are us. We have been here (all along), we have been queer, and you have been used to it, you just forgot.

Pauline Park reads a statement on behalf of NYAGRA at the QAPI press conference.

One of my favorite places on earth: Frying Pan Creek in Mt. Rainier National Park…

Awhile back, a friend of mine suggested I do ‘25 Things’ on Facebook, but I was a little reluctant to do that application on Facebook (too much like a chain letter), so I’m doing it my own way, here on my own site. So here are 25 things you may not have known about me:

1)  My favorite food: chocolate. My least favorite foods: Brussel sprouts (despite having lived in Brussels), olives (even though I love olive oil). My favorite cuisines: Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indonesian, French, Italian.

2) My favorite color to wear: fire engine red. The color I will not wear: orange (unless I suddenly and unexpectedly become a school crossing guard).

3) Schools I’ve attended: South Clement Ave. School, Fritsche Jr. High School, Bay View High School, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the London School of Economics & Political Science, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the school of life.

4) My favorite composer to listen to: Mozart. My favorite operas: “Die Zauberflöte” and “Così Fan Tutte.” My favorite composers to play: Bach, Chopin, Debussy. My favorite composers to sing: Handel, Schubert, Schumann. My least favorite composers: Bruckner, Schoenberg, Shostakovich. My favorite sopranos: Bidu Sayao, Anneliese Rothenberger, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Victoria de los Angeles, Jessye Norman, Felicity Lott, Natalie Dessay, Yvonne Kenny, Karita Mattila. Favorite mezzo-sopranos: Conchita Supervia, Christa Ludwig, Marilyn Horne, Olga Borodina, Cecilia Bartoli, Elina Garanča, Joyce DiDonato. Favorite contraltos: Kathleen Ferrier, Marian Anderson. Favorite countertenors: David Daniels, Andreas Scholl. Favorite tenors: Enrico Caruso, Jussi Bjoerling, Tito Schipa, Juan Diego Flores. Favorite baritones: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Bryn Terfel. Favorite basses: Feodor Chaliapin, Matti Talvela.

5) My favorite jazz singer: Ella Fitzgerald (esp. the Cole Porter & Gershwin songbooks). My favorite jazz standard: “Stardust” (Hoagy Carmichael). The only non-Western music that I’ve studied: Javanese gamelan. My favorite non-Western musical tradition: Balinese gamelan. My favorite Balinese gamelan musical genre: gamelan gong kebyar. My favorite Balinese gamelan dance genre: legong.

6) My favorite folk music: Celtic. My favorite folk songs: “Péarla an Bhrollaigh Bháin” (The Snowy Breasted Pearl), “Eamon An Chnuic” (Edmond of the Hill), “Snieu, Queeyl, Snieu” (Spin, Wheel, Spin – Manx spinning song) “Arrane Ny Vlieaun” (Manx milking song).

7) The songs I want sung at my memorial service: “Bist du bei mir” (Bach), “Litanei” (Schubert), “Beim Schlafengehen” (from the Vier Letze Lieder of Richard Strauss).

8) The work of literature (other than the King James Bible and the plays of Shakespeare) that I’ve read and re-read more often than any other : “The Lord of the Rings” (Tolkien).

9) My favorite poets: William Blake and John Keats (English), Joseph von Eichendorff (German), Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine (French).

10) My biggest addiction: books (buying, reading, keeping, giving). My favorite bookstore: The Strand on Broadway & E. 12th St. in Manhattan.

11) The languages that I speak: only French, really (other than English, of course); but I used to speak German quite well and I’ve also studied Italian. I took a short course in (Mandarin) Chinese and can read Pinyin and Wade-Giles. I also took a semester of Swedish (Jag studerarde svenska). I’m also reading “Beowulf” in a dual Old English (Anglo-Saxon)/contemporary English language edition (translation by Seamus Heaney). The language I’d most like to be able to speak (and am most expected to speak) but can’t: Korean — but I am trying to learn hangul (the Korean alphabet). The language that would be most useful for me to learn: Spanish. The languages that I find the most intriguing: Old English, Norwegian, Icelandic, Malagasy. My favorite dictum about languages: “Il faut parler français à ses amis, italian à ses amants, allemand à son cheval et espagnol au Dieu” (Emperor Charles V).

12) My favorite queen: Elizabeth Tudor. My least favorite (control) queen: Mike Bloomberg. The members of the British royal family I’ve seen in person: Charles, Prince of Wales (just once, by chance), Elizabeth II (riding in the Irish state coach to the state opening of parliament), the Princess Alexandra.

13) My least favorite number: 13. The numbers I like to think are lucky: 7, 11, 77.

14) The countries I’d most like to visit but haven’t yet: Iceland, Norway. The most poorest and most unusual country I’ve visited: Romania. My favorite county in Romania: Maramures. The most intriguing country that I probably won’t get to: Madagascar. The most romantic city I’ve ever visited: Venice. The city I’d most like to visit but haven’t (yet): Vienna.

15) The countries I’ve lived in: Korea, US, UK, Belgium, France, Germany. The country I don’t remember living in: Korea (I left when I was eight months old). The most annoying question about a country I’ve lived (or never lived) in: “Are you from North or South Korea…?”

16) The cities I’ve lived in: Seoul, Milwaukee, Madison, London, Chicago, Champaign-Urbana, Berlin, Regensburg, Brussels, Paris, New York. The most exciting cities I’ve lived in: London, New York. The least exciting city I’ve lived in: Champaign-Urbana. The most romantic city I’ve lived in: Paris. The most medieval city I’ve lived in: Regensburg. The most livable city I’ve lived in: Madison.

17) The smallest domicile I’ve lived in: a bedsit in Knightsbridge (London) that was the size of a large walk-in closet. The most unusual domicile I’ve lived in: Der Goldener Turm (the Golden Tower), a 12-century medieval tower in Regensburg (I lived in the renovated part of the building that dates from 1527).

18) The best health habits I’ve gotten into: reducing my consumption of refined sugar and saturated fat, using raw blue agave nectar as a sugar substitute, eating mache (a French salad green sometimes known as ‘corn salad’ or ‘lamb’s lettuce’), abjuring bottled water in favor of double-filtered water (tap filter + pitcher filter), walking instead of driving, climbing stairs instead of taking the elevator. Favorite source of animal protein: eggs (non-hormonal and certified humane, from cage-free hens).

19) My favorite artists: Jan Van Eyck, Albrecht Dürer, Antoine Watteau, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Utagawa Hiroshige, Katsushika Hokusai. My favorite architects: Louis Le Vau, Andrea Palladio, John Nash, Frank Lloyd Wright, I.M. Pei.

20) The head of government I least admire whom I’ve seen in person: Margaret Thatcher, who I saw going into Westminster Abbey to attend the memorial service for Rab Butler while I was living in London. The president I most admire: Abraham Lincoln. The worst presidents in history: George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan. Worst vice-presidents in history: Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle. The presidents I found the most disappointing: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton. The president I feel most sorry for: William Henry Harrison. The only president I’ve seen in person: Richard von Weiszäcker, president of the Federal Republic of Germany (whom I saw on the day of German reunification, 2 October 1990).

21) The most significant moment in world history that I’ve participated in: the formal reunification of Germany in October 1990; I was in the crowd of 3 million people in the Tiergarten as the president and the chancellor rang in the new ‘deutsche Einheit’ (German unity).

22) My most significant achievement: leading the campaign for enactment of the New York City transgender rights law (Int. No. 24, enacted as Local Law 3 of 2002 in April 2002). The personal achievements that took the longest to accomplish: getting a Ph.D. (five and-a-half years); coming out as an openly transgendered woman (36 years).

23) The organizations that I’ve co-founded: Gay Asians & Pacific Islanders of Chicago (GAPIC) (1994), Queens Pride House (1997), Iban/Queer Koreans of New York (Iban/QKNY) (1997), the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), the Out People of Color Political Action Club (OutPOCPAC) (2001), the Guillermo Vasquez Independent Democratic Club of Queens (GVIDCQ) (2002). The organization I will not give money to: the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

24) My favorite philosopher: Zhuangzi (The Seven Inner Chapters). My least favorite philosopher: Heidegger (a boring Nazi windbag). The denomination I grew up in: the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. The denomination I now belong to: Unitarian Universalism (my congregation is All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan). The religious habit I find most annoying: door-to-door proselytizing by Jehovah’s Witnesses. The religious prejudice I find most disturbing: Islamophobia. Religious figures I most admire: Mohandas K. Gandhi (the Mahatma), the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Rev. Forrest Church. Religious figures I least admire: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Muqtada al-Sadr.

25) The one thing I won’t be doing anytime soon: 25 Things on Facebook.

On Friday, November 20, Iowa will commemorate the first Transgender Day of Remembrance in the history of the state. I am honored to have been invited to speak at a number of events that have been organized as part of that commemoration.

On Wednesday, November 18, there will be a welcoming reception at The Center, followed by a private meeting with TransformationsIOWA, the transgender support group at the LGBT community center.  On Thursday, Nov. 19, from 8:30–9:30 p.m., there will be a  screening of “Envisioning Justice: The Journey of a Transgendered Woman” at The Center.

Friday (Nov. 20) will include the key events commemorating the Transgender Day of Remembrance:

12–1 p.m.:  Iowa State University (ISU) TDOR event in Ames
2–3:30 p.m. Grandview University TDOR event in Des Moines
5:15–6 p.m.:  Iowa State Capitol (west side)
6:30–8 p.m.:  potluck at The Center

The events have been organized by Equality Iowa’s executive director, Sandy Vopalka and Jayden McCurnin, the Transgender Outreach Coordinator at The Center, where the potluck dinner and the screening of the documentary about my life and work will be held. There will be a second screening of the film on Saturday:

10 a.m.-12 p.m.: screening of “Envisioning Justice: The Journey of a Transgendered Woman” at The Center; coffee & donuts

And on Saturday afternoon (Nov. 21), I will be participating in Iowa’s First Annual Summit of LGBT Families & Allies, organized by Lambda Legal:

1-2:10 p.m.: Transracial Adoption in LGBTQ Families:  The Challenges of Traversing Boundaries: workshop with Sandra Patton-Imani, Associate Professor of American Studies at Drake University and author of “BirthMarks:  Transracial Adoption in Contemporary America”

On Sunday (Nov. 22), I will be speaking at a forum and lunch:

11 a.m.-12:30 p.m.:  forum and lunch at the First Unitarian Church of Des Moines

As a member of All Souls Unitarian in Manhattan, I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak with fellow UUs, including members of the Interweave (LGBT affinity group) chapter at First Unitarian.

This will be only my third trip to the Hawkeye State, and I’m excited to be participating in all of these events. I am especially gratified to have the honor to speak at events commemorating the first Transgender Day of Remembrance in the history of the state.

Forrest Church and Pauline Park at All Souls in December 2008

On 24 September 2009, Forrest Church departed from his earthly life, at the age of 61, after a three-year struggle with esophageal cancer.

Forrest was the senior minister of All Souls Unitarian Church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and he was one of the reasons I joined the church in 2006, after having been ‘unchurched’ since 1978. I am referring to him here as ‘Forrest’ because that is simply what everyone at All Souls called him, as if he were one’s next-door neighbor, even though he was one of the most prominent ministers in the Unitarian Universalist Association as well as being recognized as one of the most distinguished liberal theologians in the United States.

And the key moment in my decision to join All Souls in September 24 of that year, after hearing Forrest’s sermon that morning on “The Third Great Awakening?” What struck me as most remarkable about this sermon was that Forrest concluded with a repudiation of the misuse of religion and religious faith by the administration of George W. Bush that was as eloquent as it was historically informed . Instead of trying to score partisan or ideological points — which would be all too easy, given the administration’s shameful record on foreign policy and domestic politics — Forrest instead situated the Bush presidency’s abuse of religious faith for political purposes firmly within the context of an erudite analysis of the history of religion in the United States.

The son of U.S. Senator Frank Church of Idaho, who chaired the Senate hearings into the abuses of the FBI and the CIA, Forrest Church was every bit as remarkable as his distinguished and remarkable father. As the obituary on the All Souls website notes, he was the author of 25 books, the last — The Cathedral of the World — written in the last few months of his life. One of the most quoted of contemporary liberal theologians, Forrest’s motto in life was, “Want what you have, do what you can, be who you are.” Of the supreme being, Forrest declared, “God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which is greater than all and yet present in each.”

Forrest was as beloved by family, friends, colleagues and congregants as any pastor of any American church. But unlike so many religious figures today, he was utterly without pretension. Forrest barely knew who I was, as I was a relatively new member of All Souls, and his appearances at church grew more and more infrequent as his cancer progressed, but he always greeted me with genuine warmth and friendly cheer.

Last December 21, I heard Forrest preach at All Souls, articulating the broad themes of his penultimate book, Love & Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow. Afterwards, I saw him in the fellowship hall downstairs, and he kindly agreed to autograph the copy of his book that I had just bought. He looked quite good at the time, considering that he had a terminal case of esophageal cancer, but I had the very strong intuition that it might be one of the last times that I would see him, and so I asked him if he would sit for a photo with me. Forrest very graciously agreed to post for a photo with me, though there were literally hundreds of congregation members who were eager to speak with him. Sadly, that Sunday in December was in fact the last time I would see him, and I am delighted that I have even that single photo with him to remember him by.

Forrest knew he was dying, and he faced the prospect of death with courage and serenity. In that sense, his death and especially his dying were as exemplary as his life. He said of life that “The goal of life is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.” All those who knew Forrest know what an enormous loss his death represents, but only those who knew him could possibly know what an enormous gift his life was for all of those he leaves behind.

Dan Halloran performing a pagan ritual; but are the other heathens registered Republican…?

William James wrote of “The Varieties of Religious Experience” in 1902, long before the movement now known as ‘neo-paganism’ came into its own. While I am not aware of any survey data on the matter, I suspect that most people, if asked, would probably imagine such modern pagans to be on the left of the political spectrum. So it may come as a surprise to the voters in the 19th New York City Council district — one of the two most conservative in Queens, which includes Bayside, Whitestone, Auburndale, Flushing North and other neighborhoods on the northeastern fringe of the borough — to discover that the Republican nominee for City Council in their district identifies as a pagan.

When the Queens Tribune discovered that the candidate who now has the Republican, Conservative, Independence and Libertarian Party lines going into the November general election also styles himself ‘First Atheling’ of a local group of self-identified ‘heathens’ dedicated to the worship of the old Norse gods, the weekly newspaper dubbed Dan Halloran the ‘pagan king.’

Halloran’s campaign website gives one the impression of a boilerplate tax-cutting Republican. There’s certainly nothing to indicate that the Irish American who was raised Catholic is a pagan, much less the lawyer for the New York City Pagan Pride Project. From his responses to questions from the Queens Tribune, the conservative Republican seems slightly embarrassed to have gotten media attention for his paganism, and there’s no link on his campaign website to his profile page on paganspace.net, where he calls himself ‘Dan-O’ (’O'Halloran’ apparently being the traditional Irish version of his family name). Halloran is certainly the first Republican candidate for public office I’ve ever come across who lists ‘heathenry’ as one of his hobbies or who claims to be the ‘first atheling‘ (leading prince) of a local band of Norse pagans.

Halloran’s belief system — ‘Theodism‘ — is defined by The Witches’ Voice as “a heathen orthodox approach to Germanic reconstruction.” I suppose if one is going to run as a heathen Republican, it is probably best not to stray too far from heathen orthodoxy; if one does, one risks the wrath of people with names like ‘Swain Wodening’ and ‘Gert Thygen McQueen.’ But Halloran’s more recent concern has been less the anger of the Thaet Angelseaxice Ealdriht than the displeasure of the barons and thanes of the Queens County Republican Party  organization. After rumors that Halloran might get the axe — wielded no doubt by the decidedly post-Norse, conventionally religious party boss Phil Ragusa — Halloran’s spokesperson insisted that the candidate would not be offered a judgeship or pushed aside in favor of Paul Vallone (scion of former Council Speaker Peter Vallone, Sr.), who had just lost the Democratic primary in the 19th to Kevin Kim. So apparently the “GOP is standing by their Theodsman,” as one neo-pagan blogger put it.

“What we [the Queens County Republican Party] have done is stand firmly with Dan Halloran and called on Congressman [Gary] Ackerman and his staffer Kevin Kim to renounce the vile, repugnant attacks on Dan Halloran’s faith and heritage,” Vince Tabone (Queens executive vice-chairman and spokesperson for the Halloran campaign) was quoted as saying. Tabone’s tone of moral indignation might have more credibility if there were any indication on Halloran’s website or in his campaign literature of a commitment to diversity of religious and spiritual expression or any history of the Queens County Republican Party’s commitment to such diversity. Certainly, the national Republican Party has been the instrument of the religious right from 1980 to the present day and its intolerance for any form of religion except Christian fundamentalism of the most bigoted sort has had a profoundly negative impact on this country for more than a generation.

While Dan Halloran would be the first pagan-identified candidate that I am aware of to win elected office in this city or anywhere in the state, the fact is that he was not running as an ‘out and proud’ pagan. Halloran was ‘outed’ by the Tribune and has seemed sheepish in trying to defend himself, saying simply that his religious faith should be kept out of the race — not at all the response one would expect from someone who cites Beowulf as one of his heroes. Perhaps Halloran could more effectively rally the neo-pagan vote in the 19th district if he were more stout in his defense of his Theodic faith. But the 19th is not, as far as I am aware, a hotbed of heathenry; in fact, it is one of the most socially and politically conservative Council districts in New York City and one of the few in which Republican candidates are viable, so Halloran does have a good chance of winning the seat being vacated by Council Member Tony Avella, who on Sept. 15 lost the Democratic primary for mayor to Bill Thompson.

Whichever candidate wins, he will be making history. The high heathen Halloran will face Kevin Kim in the general election in November, as Kim won the hotly contested Democratic primary on  Sept. 15. The deputy director for community affairs for U.S. Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-5), Kim has his boss’s support, and if he prevails in November, he would be the first Korean American elected to public office in the borough or the city.  Kim’s candidacy takes on added significance, given the failure of Korean American John Choe — the former chief of staff to outgoing Council Member John Liu — to win the Democratic primary for the seat being vacated by his boss (now the all-but-certain City Comptroller) in the 20th district, centered on Flushing. Choe was the victim of a particularly vicious red-baiting campaign that attempted –without any evidence — to tie him to the totalitarian regime that rules North Korea, simply by virtue of his membership in Nodutdol, a progressive New York-based organization working for the peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula. Kevin Kim is now the only candidate for City Council of Korean descent, and on November 3, the voters of the 19th district will determine whether a Korean American takes office for the first time in the history of the city or the state.

I live in the 25th Council district in western Queens, which seems a world away from the 19th in ambience and political culture; but if I were a voter in the 19th district, I would certainly vote for Kevin Kim, whose politics are clearly more progressive than Halloran’s warmed-over right-wing Bush Republicanism. Kim is my atheling of choice.

Beowulf? or Thane of Cawdor…?