So I didn't wake up quite so early today as I did yesterday. Last night we were up late playing cards -- but I'm getting ahead of myself! Yesterday was an action packed day. We began the day with a lovely breakfast prepared by the staff here at the Wildwood Retreat Center. The highlight was this amazing blueberry cake/break, toasted with a smear of peanut on top. Heaven!!!
I found some of the conversations yesterday a bit challenging. I haven't yet voiced some of my concerns, because I like to see where the conversation heads. I also wasn't quite sure what those concerns were. Now that I've had time to sleep with it, I feel that they mostly derive from one of the sessions that relied heavily on the language of "oppression" and "structuralism" (e.g. "white men hold the power"), which I find completely erases the complexity of everyday life. Collectively white men may indeed hold many of the cards, but: 1) we can imagine plenty of white men who are pretty powerless in many situations -- whether it be due to economic or gendered reasons; and 2) this erases -- and I mean erases -- any potential to understand how masculinity (which works to buttress male privelege) also has deeply painful emotional consequences for all men (and all women too, at that!). So I felt a bit frustrated by the conversation here, which I found relied on a kind of 60s / 70s style oppression framework that I thought had gone out of style (for good reason).
Phew. I'm glad to have written that to process my thoughts here. I'll find a chance hopefully to share them later. After this session, we were split up into "tribes" of men -- small working groups that we would be relying on for the rest of the academy. My tribe is the "Oh Mighty Sisi" tribe, which plays on the fact that Isis (the Egyptian God) spelled backwards is Sisi (pronounced, of course, like sissy). We used a piece of the music from the TV show from the 70s, The Secrets of Isis. We might have changed the words a bit:
Oh Mighty Isis!
Sissy Winds
That Blow on High
Lift Us High
Into the Sky
There may have been some lisping and limp-wristing involved in our performance of said song. Good times.
We moved on to have a chat about the Gay Men's Health Movement's history and development over the past 20 years or so (with a loose timeline extending much further into the past). This is of course important historical work, to mark our progress and development and to make sure that other people also mark and remember it. We traced out history as coming out of the African-American and Women's Health Movements of the 70s, which both worked in reaction to a medical establishment that was not meeting their needs (and was often doing damage to their communities).
Perhaps one of the day's highlights was a participant-led workshop from Michael Scarce, whose work on crystal meth in San Fran I recently discussed here. He led a discussion about creating a movement of men who were trained to respond quickly and effectively to media messaging and medical research that potentially stigmatizes (or outright demonizes) gay men's lives and sexualities. This of course comes directly out of his work with MSRA recently, but also comes out of a desire to broaden the conversations beyond MRSA. I think this is excellent -- and I hope our conversations bears real fruit in the future.
The event was lovely. A group of us walked up to "Julie Andrews Point," which is called as such because it gloriously resembles the scene from The Sound of Music in which Julie Andrews run across the field singing the movie's theme song. It was pitch dark when we went up there, although the moon was so bright that the fields were basked in a silvery light. One of the participants by the name of Eric sang some songs and told some lovely scary stories -- which were only seperated by Chris Bartlett's painfully accurate renditions of a few of Ethel Merman's songs. Intense!
And of course post-storytelling, I had to jump into the hot tub. Yes! Gotta love the hot tub. Okay, I have to run. Time for breakfast! I woke up a bit late.
xoxo
Trevor
