Back in December when I found out which of my proposals were accepted, it didn’t sound so bad. I was involved in two offerings for Pantheacon (Pcon), and I also was accepted for two presentations at another conference that same weekend. It seemed entirely doable to present twice on Saturday at the other conference, perform in a ritual theater piece that night, and sit on a panel on Sunday morning. I’d have plenty of time for socializing and networking.

I was actually kind of relieved that the other proposal I’d submitted to Pcon wasn’t accepted. I had already told DK that I would only be in Oracles from the Living Tarot (OLT) if there was a last minute spot. However, heading into January my presentation was accepted. OK, five things. Still doable right?

Flash forward to three weeks before Pantheacon. My life is rehearsals 2x week for A Modern Dionysian Initiation (AMDI), ½ hour phone check ins with students from a class I teach, 30hr work weeks, materials prep, class meetings, planning sessions and craziness. I have actually never been so busy in my entire life. Add to that mix a last minute cast need for OLT because I’m a loving and devoted husband. Leading up to Pcon I was very stressed about how it was all going to work out.

Arriving at con: We’re about 20 hours late. There’s still a ton of prep work to do, and soon the room will be filled with maenads. Well two, but maenads take up a lot of space. DK leaves to take a walk around the con. I stay behind to practice my 9pm presentation and finish some last minute prep for the session. I’m super excited. It’s day 1. First official stop is the Pagan Alliance suite to socialize at Queer Cocktails. I have about 45 minutes. I meet some great people including Les and Sister Krissy Fiction. I also began handing out my own ribbons, “One Ribbon to Rule Them All.”

I head down to the rooms where I will present “Lifting the Veil: Exploring Our Own Gender Identity.” This originally was meant to be a co-presentation with a colleague Dr. Christine Brooks. We were to deliver the same presentation the following day at the other conference. However, Christine wasn’t able to come. I still wanted to present some of the material, but I decided to change it up a bit. I started by stating that the presentation was first and foremost to be about community binding. I wanted the people in the room, myself included, to be bound to one another as allies and friends throughout the rest of the conference. I was heartened when my community responded that they would like that as well. The very cute Brian called the directions for us, and we cast circle by introducing ourselves and everyone calling back with “Hi, ______.” We grasped each others hands until the circle was complete. Very lovely.

I then guided them through a series of exercises to help them see new aspects of how they perceive gender in themselves and others. This was fairly experimental on my behalf. I wasn’t sure if the work would happen the way I envisioned it. There is refinement to be made, but the intention and results did come through.

After that… well to the party rooms of course. I am a Dionysian after all. I had a lovely, if not early night interacting with all sorts of interesting people.

The next morning I’m up at 8amish so I can go sit in the lobby on a computer and finish typing up my handout for the presentation at the other conference later that day. After that, DK and I head over to Denny’s for breakfast. Why do I always get pancakes? I hate them; I do. But then there’s the butter and syrup. Anyway, I digress. Back to the room to make a prop for AMDI before showering and heading out to the other conference.

The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (ITP)/Association of Transpersonal Psychology (ATP) Biennial Conference on Spirituality and Psychology was also happening the same weekend as Pantheacon. Pantheacon is my home and where my tribes gather. ITP/ATP is where I hope I can translate all this crazy gender spirituality sexuality stuff into a profession, or at least part of one.

I meet up with the aforementioned Christine Brooks, and we find out we have the main stage for our presentation. The powers that be decided that we would have the best video presence. Ok. It meant, however, that we couldn’t move around and pretty much had to stand side by side the whole time. It is a good thing we love each other. I’m not going to go into specifics about what was presented there, because I’m going to write up a separate post about my thoughts on gender and the work that I do around it. I also hope that I can link to the recorded version of it.
We did a great job and had lots of sharing and feedback from the audience. It was a challenge because we had originally designed the presentation for a regular room. It was less intimate on the main stage, and so some of the juicy sharing didn’t happen.

After that Christine led a round table discussion about the intersections of politics, community, media and pop culture. I was able to stay for about 15 minutes of that before I was off to put up my poster for the poster presentation. Oh I didn’t tell you I had to craft a 40” x 60” poster in the weeks leading up to Pcon as well? It is truly a lovely poster.

The poster session is really a cocktail party where the rest of the conference gets to schmooze while the 8 of us with posters are working. My poster was crafted out of my dissertation work, with the addition of some emerging concepts. That work will come in another post as well. The title of the poster is “Reunion: The Stories of Men Reconciling Their Spirituality and Homosexuality.”

The very first person who walks by stops and says, “This man and man together thing. I think it’s wrong.”

Alrighty then, let’s go. Actually, I think in the end much of the friction was a result of culturally bound ideas, both his and mine. After a long time he moved on, and I headed for the wine. Everyone else that came through was very excited that I had done the work and had really interesting things to share about their own experiences. Someone expressed interest in having me come and speak with their spiritual group. Umm, Yes! I even met a fellow pagan, who was not attending PCon because of this conference. We bonded over that and other like interests.

I arrived back at the hotel around 8pm, and as I enter the room, I remark, “For a gay man I certainly see more than my fair share of boobies.” For now the room really was full of maenads, and Dionysos, all getting ready for the 11pm A Modern Dionysian Initiation (AMDI). I’m not sweating this one. Easy costumes for me, minimal make up. I know the songs. I mostly know the lines, but I know the story cold.

Now for those of you who weren’t there, AMDI was our adaptation of the Rocky Horror Picture Show as told via the myths of Dionysos. A more detailed blog on AMDI is emerging. I have surprisingly a lot to unpack about that one. What needs to be said here about my involvement was that I completely lost the story and most of my lines the moment we started. I was very spaced out while I watched a vision that I’ve held for two years manifest with me in the midst of it. It was a very special experience. Coming out of that at 1ish I was so amped up that I buzzed around until very early in the morning.

And with that morning came another offering: Queer Rites: Making Meaning for and from Sexual/Gender Diversity. That was a fantastic panel. Hopefully soon we will have a link for that as well. On the Panel were joi wolfwomyn, T. Thorn Coyle, and P Sufenas Virius Lupus. It was facilitated by Dr. Sarah Astarte. Though we didn’t quite talk about what the title entails we did have a great dialogue with one another and with the participants in the audience.

After that was lunch and some walking around with DK. This was the only time I really had time to do this during the weekend. Then it was time to go back to the room to prep for my role in Oracles from the Living Tarot (OLT). I was the Hierophant this year. I told DK that if he got to the very end of the line with casting that I would step in for whatever was needed. So on the Monday before the con I’m writing a Hierophant monologue and preparing a performance. And Sunday I’m back in the room painting a sign and memorizing lines.

I will write about OLT here. OLT was my first introduction into doing ritual theater at Pantheacon. The year that I decided I needed to bring home a nice pagan boy was the first year I saw OLT. DK also directed that production, and he played the Fool and the Tower. And well, we just celebrated our 4th Anniversary. I have participated each year since as the Emperor, the Devil, the Wheel of Fortune, and now the Hierophant. OLT has provided me with an opportunity for becoming more comfortable delivering spiritual content to a number of people. The irony is that I don’t really work with tarot much myself. Living with a tarot master rubs off enough I guess!

This ritual was different for me though. I started to crash hard before the ritual even started. I ate. I had a vitamin c packet. I tried to pep up. We do an opening sometimes where we sound 3 ahs. The first ah is where you ask for what you need. I asked for energy and stamina to make it through, and I asked for the Hierophant to be called first. 1. I needed not to be stressed about whether I could perform or not, and I felt like I was going to collapse. 2. The Hierophant had a strong message to share:

Hierophant
Entrance Music: In the Year 2525 by Zager & Evans
(Enter carrying a sign that reads)

JUDGEMENT DAY!
May 21, 2001
October, Something, 2011
December 21, 2012
2525

Message:
“This isn’t about what we believe anymore it’s about them.”
Who are these them?
When we talk about our community, who do we mean?
The people in our organizations?
Our town? Our city? Our country?
Do we mean the people who think like us, or share similar values?
The people who are alike us physically or spiritually?
From where I stand, everyone is community.
My station, my service, is to help bind community together through shared experience, ritual and tradition.
Occasionally, and it is my most sacred duty, I help to bind community together as co-creators of a possible future.
And when it comes time to do that work, a call goes out to as many as may be impacted by the work. Because this is a working for the community, the community as a whole needs to be represented.
For how could I, or you, from our individual positions accurately know the needs of the larger community by only employing the knowledge of those who look like us, or are from the same city, or are a part of our inner circles?
Work done to build a better future for all must be done by all, in partnership and cooperation.
Perhaps if there is judgment day in our future it’s not about the end of the world, but the end of privileging kinds of people over others, and an embrace of the human community.
But, for that to happen,

(turns around, changes sign, and shows audience)

JUDGEMENT DAY!
May 21, 2001
October, Something, 2011
December 21, 2012
2525
NOW

we need not wait until the end of the world.

This message of binding community together was really my focus coming into Pcon this year. The Hierophant helped enable me to stand in that role, and will continue to do so for the next year. As we were on stage waiting for the audience to come in and be seated I continued to fade, then all of the sudden energy was surging in me. At first I thought I was having a heart attack because my heart felt like it was racing, and I was heating up. Craziness, right? It subsides a bit, and we do our opening and go off to where we wait for our cards to be called. Call #1, The Hierophant.

I wish I could say I rose to the occasion, but I didn’t. I started to forget my lines, and I wasn’t punching my points. I just didn’t have it in me. However I was very glad to have gone first and eventually everything returned to homeostasis.

Immediately after that I went outside with a few friends to enjoy the night, as I left them and was walking back to the room I encountered a series of interesting people. First was Les whom I met the first night at the Pagan Alliance party. I had actually encountered him a number of times since our first meeting, but always when I was off by myself somewhere. As I left him I immediately encountered The Rite of the Bear Mother ritualists as they made their way to their rite. I gave Lady Yeshe Rabbit a knowing nod, and she twinkled back.

I then made my way to the blessed fireplace outside of the restaurant in the main lobby. Already warming himself was a gentleman named Cedar. I had seen Cedar all con, often sitting by himself in out of the way places. I broke the ice with “Is it warm sitting here.” “Yes especially if you lean against the grate.” Which I promptly did.

Cedar had an interesting story to tell me. He told me a bit about professional poker. It seems that he was a semi professional poker player, and he was in San Jose for a local tournament or some such gathering. He did some research to see what else was going on and found Pantheacon. He considers himself pagan, came to check it out, and was having a great time.

Soon members of the Circle of Cerridwen moved past me. The last person in the group stopped and asked, “So Hayden are you going to the protest?” I had completely forgotten about it. I answered, “I’m tired. I’m cold. And I’ve been protesting all weekend.” And I meant it. Everything I brought forward this year was my activism and devotion to Dionysos.

Dionysos is an interesting deity. We know what he’s most famous for: wine, ecstasy, theater. He is an agricultural deity. Many of his rites were about breaking taboos and transgressing norms. He is very much a god of the people.

This is how I am in communion with Dionysos now, as a god of the people. He advocates on behalf of those who are marginalized by helping them release their troubles through various means, including but not limited to, nights of drunken revelry. However there are also deeper teachings here.

I have a two fold mission. 1. To empower queer (however you define it) people to free themselves internally (emotionally, intellectually, spiritually). 2. When empowered, to then work to free others and self if necessary in the world (physically, communally, expressively). The way that I’ve done that is through pushing my own limits with performing and being in front of people.

Performing forces me to interact with myself as another person. It helps me to see my habitual patterns as I am acting as a different person. That process, coupled with overcoming fears about performing, being part of some really really amazing work, being surrounded by an amazing group of co-conspirators who believe in me, and I them, has brought me to a place where I can present at two conferences and fully represent my queer and pagan self and communities. It continues to be a really special and powerful process. I try to foster that in others by helping them to manifest their dreams and ideas through Circle of Dionysos.

So when I say, “I’m doing it for Dionysos,” what I mean is that I’m doing it for the people, for my community. Working for the community is hard work. This Pantheacon was hard work. Hard sometimes crazy making work. I wouldn’t trade it for the world, but as they say…

Madness takes its toll.

PantheaCon is such a major event for the pagan community, particularly on the West Coast, that the events and controversies that come out of it reverberate across the pagan blogoshere every year, and certainly this year is no exception.  I have no doubt that in the days to come, clergy-members from the Circle of Dionysos (including myself) will use this space to speak to some of the controversies that came out of this year’s convention as well as speaking in more depth about their experiences of some of our offerings this year,  but I wanted to start off our Pantheacon coverage with a recap of my personal experience at this year’s convention.

Hayden and I had intended to go down to the Con on Thursday evening, but circumstances dictated otherwise.  Instead, we found ourselves rushing through lots of last minute business and didn’t manage to leave our place until mid-afternoon on Friday.  We arrived at the Pantheacon hotel between 3:30 and 4PM, which meant that from the beginning of my con, I had already missed 2 of the 4 events at this con that I really wanted to attend (The Queer Pagan Panel at 1:30 and The Ekklesia Antinuou and Queer Youth Spirituality at 3:30).  As a multiple item presenter over the past several years, however, I’ve learned to let go of expectations and focus on what I need to get done.  So we went up to our room where I set up our altar to Dionysos while Hayden prepped for his workshop that evening, and then I headed up to the Pagan Alliance Suite to help out with Queer Cocktails.  The day caught up with me pretty quick, though, and I took an early evening.

Saturday I made my first Dennys run in the 10 years I’ve been going to PCon.  Really?  There’s a Denny’s that close?  And they offer a PCon attendee discount?  Awesome!  Then it was off to attend the only 1 of the 4 workshops I’d planned to make, Abel Gomez’s The Holy Queer: Shamans, Healers, Dancers, and Ritualists.  Abel did a great job giving an overview of various sacred roles held by people we would today identify as queer in precolonial cultures around the world, including a number of East Asian functionaries that I hadn’t encountered in my studies before.  I also have to admit to feeling gratified to see my own picture (as part of a poster collage) pop up in his slideshow as he talked about The Circle of Dionysos and his experience attending Yes They Are! Meeting and Greeting the Queerest of the Gods.  Not that I have an ego or anything…

Next up for me was the my first official offering at Pcon, Ritual Theater, What is it and How to Use it, which I co-facilitated with Robin LaSirena.  This was the first time I’ve co-led a workshop at PCon, and I found it much more difficult than I expected.  I was incredibly grateful to be working with someone as talented and experienced in workshop leadership as Robin, and I learned a lot from the experience, which will hopefully help me grow in this realm.  We had planned an ambitious set of topics to discuss/exercises to perform for an hour and a half long workshop, and amazingly we made it through everything we planned to do.  Huzzah!

After a short stop at Tea With the Queens: Long Island Edition up in the Pagan Alliance Suite, It was time to move into ritual prep mode, with a dinnertime rehearsal for Oracles from the Living Tarot followed immediately by heading into preparation for A Modern Dionysian Initiation.  Can I just mention how bad the complimentary razors at the Doubletree are?  It took three of them to give me a proper drag shave in preparation for playing Dionysos!  Still, my prep needs were nothing compared to joi wolfwomyn’s preparation for taking on Janet!

I know Hayden is planning on writing a long post about the experience of creating and performing A Modern Dionysian Initiation later, so I won’t dwell too much on that aspect here.  Suffice to say, this was our most ambitious project to date, and I’m super happy that we pulled it off as well as we did.  Frankly, I don’t remember much of the ritual.  If I was “onstage,” then I was pretty deeply embedded in the experience.  The moments I do remember tend to be when I was off stage and trying to get things set up for my next entrance.  I also remember how invested our “audience participants” were in the interactive nature of the rite.  It was so much fun!  And it was really wonderful to hear the responses afterwards from folks who were thrilled that we took source material that for them “was church” and honored it as sacred.  Our culture creates such a division between the sacred and the profane (or even the mundane) that we forget all too often that our ancestors knew no such division.  One of the things I want our circle to do is to help re-member the unity of these realms, and I feel like we managed to do so with this rite.

Coming out of the high that was AMDI, very few of us got to bed at a reasonable hour, but still several of us managed to be up and back at it for The Circle of Dionysos’ other offering at Con this year: Queer Rites, Making Meaning for and from Sexual/Gender Diversity.  There was a lot of great discussion on the panel, and we’ll be linking to the recording once it is up, but I want to highlight one interaction that for me encapsulated everything I was hoping would come from this panel.  It came in the form of back to back questions during the question and answer period.  The first was from someone in the audience who earlier in the panel had made a comment that set a lot of people in the room to shifting uncomfortably.  That person, recognizing that tails had been stepped upon, came forward and asked, “I’m not trying to be offensive, I’m here in friendship trying to understand.  How can I word myself better so as to not give offence? ”  After the panel responded, this question was immediately followed by a transperson asking, “How as a transperson can I learn to see the difference between someone who is acting from hostility and someone who is just trying to understand but doesn’t have the right words yet?”  I’m paraphrasing here, but it was a profound moment for me to watch two people make a choice try to find ways to listen and communicate compassionately instead of continuing a pattern of projection and reaction.  And it was magical.

Last up for me was Oracles from the Living Tarot on Sunday Night.  This year marks my 10th year taking part in OLT (6 of which have been at PCon) and this production was the 5th that I directed/coordinated (my 3rd at PCon).  So it was a big year for me.  I was really nervous going into this ritual as I knew the deck this year had a lot of heavy stuff to unload, and unload it did–Strength, The Tower, and Death all got pulled within the first seven cards, and two of them were back to back.  Get ready for a rocky spring folks!  I was soo happy that The Magician, which I was aspecting, got pulled for Litha and I got to shift all that heavy energy into focused intent and action while getting the whole room up and moving!

I’d intended to go to Queer Celtic Mythology after OLT was over, but my energy was pretty much done. Instead it was up to our room to de-costume and decompress, then out for a last visit up to the PA Suite.  Another Con was done, and in the morning we would pack, take the drive north, and collapse…

The Circle of Dionysos presented our 5th version of Yes They Are! at Pantheacon 2011 on Saturday afternoon, and many of us who were involved felt that this was our best production to date.  Director Robin LaSirena decided to frame this production within the traditional structure of The Lenaia.  We opened the ritual with a processional while singing the Seikilos, an ancient hymn to Dionysos that was found with musical notations, making it the oldest surviving complete musical composition in the world.  Benu, the Circle’s Honorary Orpheus who found Seikolos for us, taught the song to the crowd outside of the ritual space so that they could sing with us as they entered the space.  Then we were off on a comedic “competition” as each of the Gods sought to convince the crowd that they were the biggest ally of the LBGTIQQ community.  Hilarity ensued, particularly as Gods joined forces to play “Disfunctional Family Feud” or stripped down for the “Shallow Visual Competition.”  Who won?  We’ll never know. Dionysos called a halt to the proceedings before a winner could be announced, then got everyone up on their feet and dancing for nearly 15 minutes (even though the music only lasted for 5)!

Dieties who came through for this ritual were: Ganesha, Poseidon, Sekhmet, Hadrian, Zeus, La Nuestra Senora De las Putas (an aspect of La Virgen de Guadelupe/Tonantzin), Ninanna, Iris, Set, and Dionysos.  We also had a cadre of Maenads and Satyrs acting as support staff for the rite.

Om gam ganapataye namaha!

Ganesha is set in the middle of the circle and the cloth is removed.  One minion paints a Tilak on his mask, another gives him a sacrifice of coconut, another of candy.

I was first given life by Parvati in order to serve as the guardian of her privacy while she bathed.   I was a beautiful boy, sensitive and devoted.  But there were those who could not respect that sensitivity, who felt no need to honor my mother’s wishes,  even among those who were closest to me.  And so it came to be that my own stepfather cut off my head because I honored my mother’s charge over his desire.  So you might say that I know something about being bullied as a youth, of being rejected by those who one should be able to trust.  Homophobia is rooted in sexism, in the fear that one’s existence challenges another’s notions of masculine privilege.  If you wish to protect the youth of tomorrow, you must learn to see your obstacles in their entirety.

But wait!  My story, It Gets Better!  When Parvati learned of what Shiva had done, she was inconsolable  and told Shiva that if He didn’t fix this, He was (sung) Never gonna get it….again.   So Shiva sent his ganas to bring back the head of the first creature they could find.  They brought back the head of a female elephant, sewed it onto my body, and breathed back my life into me.  So now I am both transgender *and* transspecies.  You can’t get any queerer than that!

I am known as both the Remover and the Creator of Obstacles.  But this should not surprise any of you.  After all, those in your community who are like me are seen in exactly the same way.    It is easy to honor them in a historical context as the removers of obstacles; to refer to that night in 1969 when a bunch of drag queens and transsexuals rioted in New York City as “the beginning of the Gay Rights movement.”  But today they are treated like the creator of obstacles.  “Why can’t *those* people act normal like the rest of us?  Why are they always parading around in their feather boas and assless chaps?  Can’t they see that this is why middle America hates gay people?  How are we ever going to get same sex marriage with *them* on the TV?”  And so the oppression begins within your own community.

What is forgotten is that “those people” are out there every day questioning the norm and so removing societal barriers for finding and expressing one’s true self for everyone.  If it were not for “those people,” then the “normal gays” of today would still be considered “those people.”  The cultural shift that “those people” enact is both more enduring and more profound  than any short term political battles that may be lost because of them. So honor your freaks, your transfolk, your drag kings and queens,  the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the leather daddies, and the dykes on bikes, for without them there could be no movement, no removal of obstacles.

Remember this:  I was a household Deity with no festivals and no major following until 1893, when a wise man used my image and fesival and to unite the people in Maharashtra against the British colonial rule.  So I know something about struggles for equality.  One must be memorable before one can become an icon.  Which of your icons is most memorable?  A congressman from Massachusetts?  No.  A former boy band member who was outed by his boyfriend?  No.  A round-bellied, dog shit eating Drag Queen who called herself Divine?  Now that one has possibilities.

They tore me limb from limb, but I returned, stronger than before, and I prevailed.  My own family, my blood kin denied my place and power, cast me out.  But I returned, and when I returned, I was the stronger.  In all my journeys among you I have been reviled, scorned, called less than my fellows, but each and every time I have faced down my detractors, and they have called me God.  I have claimed my birthright, and it is time for you to follow.

I am the ultimate girlie man and from that I draw my strength.  Why?  Because I embrace it.  Because I own it.  Because I offer it as my gift.  My gift is madness.

It is madness for a man to deny his active lust and learn the pleasures of the passive.  It is madness for a woman to abandon her hearth and home to roam wild through the fields.  It is madness for a woman to kill and a man to refrain from killing.  It is madness…in Their eyes.  And every time we force them to see themselves in those positions, their madness grows, and with it the seeds of their destruction, for unlike me they will not be reborn with will and memory intact.  So fuck ‘em.  You all know better.  In you I see my visions come to life.  Like me, you are reborn out of adversity.  Like me, you challenge the rules of acceptable behavior and gender binaries and in so doing force your fellows to see past their limitations to the truth: We are One.

Yet again I hear you crying out in pain, reviled, scorned, called less than your fellows, trod upon like the grape.  Do not be like my brother bemoaning the loss of a beheaded flower.  Be like my Father, snatch the baby from the fire and hide it away, ready to be born another day even stronger than before.  Don’t need a hero, Be a hero.  A wise man once said “all the world is a stage and we are merely players upon it.”  This is your moment in the spotlight, make the most of it!  Command that stage and own your  pain, scream your pain, use your pain to make them cry, so that when they leave this theater and walk onto their own stages they are inspired to change the lines.  But do not become addicted to the pleasure of pain, for this too must pass.  Overdone Tragedy becomes Comedy, and overdone Comedy becomes boring.  Tonight’s Diva is tomorrow’s day old drag queen—Lipstick smeared, eyeliner clumped, heel broken,  making the walk of shame.

Everything changes.  Everything is born and dies and is reborn yet again.  The agony of the crushed grape becomes the ecstacy of the wine soaked revel.  Life is short.  Life is sweet.  Life is all that you know you have.  Why waste it living by someone else’s rules?  Find your joy in the vine, let my madness fill you, take back your nights and fill them with your heart’s desire.  And be grateful for the invention of plastic as it makes some of those desires much more easily fulfilled.  When I fulfilled my vow to Prosymnos back in the day, I ended up with so many splinters up my ass that I couldn’t sit down for a week?

Does it surprise you to hear a god speak this way?  “What about the children?” they say.  Turn that question around.  What about your children?  I speak not only of those you have sired, birthed, or raised.  I speak not only of those children who follow in your footsteps.  I speak of all your children.  An ancient sculptor shared your appreciation of his fellow’s form, and this child of his has lived on for thousands of years.  Another wise man in a state of ecstasy taught him by his beloved Shams exclaimed, “The wine I drink is the fire of love and God Himself pours it into my mouth. “ This and thousands of other poetic offspring sprung from this man’s love continue to inspire us a millennia later.  Reclaim your broken spiritual heritage that your children will know their importance, release your power that your children will be safe, and remind your fellow man that there are other ways of being and all need to be honored and protected.  Difference is not an aberration.  Difference is the point of existence.  If uniformity were the point of creation then a floating bed of algae would be the highest evolved creature and humanity wouldn’t exist.  So claim your peculiarities and differences, embrace them, learn to make them necessities and hone them until they are fabulous.  Every glass is always full, and this wise man says “Drink Up!”

Yes They Are! Meeting and Greeting the Queerest of the Gods Playshop and Performance

San Francisco, Ca.  The Circle of Dionysos is proud to present the fourth production of their signature ritual performance piece Yes They Are! Meeting and Greeting the Queerest of the Gods, conceived of and coordinated by Derik K Cowan at Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory.

In current times, religion is generally seen to be at odds with sexuality and gender variance, and members of the LBGTIQQ community often become victims of spiritual violence.  Historically, however, this was not the case—those who were gender variant or homoerotically inclined held important and unique positions in the spiritual traditions of many cultures around the world.  Yes They Are! was created to reintroduce some of those ancient (and not so ancient) traditions into our culture and to provide a source of affirmation and blessing to those within the LBGTIQQ community.   To date the Circle of Dionysos has performed three productions of this ritual performance, each featuring a different cast of Deities culled from various cultural pantheons, and all of our performances have attracted both standing room only audiences and rave reviews.

In addition to the ritual performance, The Circle of Dionysos will also be offering an interactive “playshop” facilitated by members of our cast.  During this playshop attendees will be given the opportunity to experiment with some of our creative processes and perhaps develop their own rituals of affirmation.  This playshop is the seed a larger Yes They Are! project that we plan to eventually develop into a full weekend retreat, so this is a great chance to get a glimpse of where we are growing and add your own input to influence our evolution!

Yes They Are! Meeting and Greeting the Queerest of the Gods will be presented for one night only on July 3^rd.  The Playshop will begin at 7PM with the performance scheduled for 8:30PM.  Suggested Donation is $20, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.  For more information, please contact The Circle of Dionysos at info@circleofdionysos.com.

It was that time of year again!  PantheaCon 2010 was held at the Doubletree in San Jose February 12-15th!  Pantheacon is one of if not the largest Pagan Convention in the United States–4 days packed full of rituals, workshops, lectures, concerts, parties, vendors, hospitality suites, and more!  Here’s a quick rundown of what The Circle of Dionysos did at this year’s PCon:

Our big event for PCon this year was the return of Yes They Are! Meeting and Greeting the Queerest of the Gods.  Our production in 2009 was a huge success with lots of people calling it their favorite event of  Con.  Not ones to rest on our laurels however, we brought in a whole new cadre of Deities with new messages for this year!  We were again standing room only, and even though we had to fight to be heard against  the rock concert playing next door, my sense was that our audience poured all of their power into hearing what we had to say.   Certainly as a performer I could see and hear the audience’s emotional investment in the tears on faces during certain scenes and the laughter during the more lighthearted moments.  I’m super proud of our cast and crew of ritualists for stepping up and I’m looking forward to next year and working with the new people who came to us after the ritual and expressed interest in bringing their Deities in!

Our fiscal sponsors The Pagan Alliance hosted a hospitality suite as usual this year, so we participated in their events as well.  We were official co-hosts for Pizzanalia!, the Saturday Evening pizza party from 5:30-7:00PM, and while we weren’t there in any official capacity, you can bet we were around for the Queer Meet and Greet Cocktail Party Friday Night from 8:00 to 9:00 PM.

Our entire board of directors and many other members of the Yes They Are! cast also performed in this year’s Oracles from the Living Tarot on Sunday Night at 7PM.  This made for an intense switchover between productions and led to some very creative connecting of the rituals (including The Fool from OLT being transformed onstage into Dionysos for YTA).  All and all a very magical night of ritual theater–so magical that it claimed my voice for the rest of the night and the next day!

We had an amazing time and are already planning for next year!

Whether you consider your craft to be artistic or magical, it seems as if someone is always telling you to Write Down Your Experiences.  Dream Journals, Rehearsal Journals, Books of Shadows, Books of Scripts—no matter what you call them or claim as their purpose they all amount to the same thing–extra time added to your daily practice spent writing down what you did.  If you’re like me, it’s also the hardest piece of that practice.  When I’m coming out of an amazing ritual/performance/rehearsal, I want to ride that experience’s afterglow.  The last thing I want to do is grab pen and paper!  The same is true when I wake up from an intense dream or have a spark of inspiration–I don’t want to stop and record it, I want to get right to processing.   We live in a short attention span world, and all this journaling is slowing me down.  Why the constant insistence that these books are important?

The first and most obvious answer is also the most cliche–we write things down so that we don’t forget them.  There is no worse experience than having a ritual in which we created this amazing hymn or a rehearsal in which we made a real breakthrough in terms of character or staging  and then not having the ability to recreate that hymn or that breakthrough because we’ve forgotten it and no one wrote it down.  Studies have shown us that writing things down actually has a twofold affect on memory–not only do the written records we’ve produced fill in the gaps in between what we remember, but writing also helps us to remember more in the first place.  Because writing is a physical process that uses 2 of our senses–vision and touch–it invokes our sense memory or physical memory as well as our rational or mental memory, and we are more likely to find a memory if it is stored in multiple parts of ourselves.

Writing is a bridging process between more than just our physical and mental memories.  The second reason that Magi, Mystics, and Artists are so keen on writing things down is that writing as a practice helps bridge between our creative/subconscious selves and our analytic/conscious selves.  Hayden mentioned this when he talked about dream journals–by writing our visions down we can start to track symbols and where/how they appear and thus begin to understand what those symbols mean to us.  Similarly, writing requires us to find a way to quantify and qualify our visceral experiences, to find a way of communicating them and that requires us to break down our right brain/left brain or conscious/subconscious barriers.  This is one reason why I personally find that a real “paper and pen” recording process works best for me in this sort of work–I can continue to communicate via doodles and diagrams when verbal communication methods fail to bridge that gap.  That’s not so easy to do on a word processor.

I’ve known the above reasons for the recording process of my practice for years, but just this past week I discovered a third reason that no one had really made explicit to me before.  I was going through some old papers when I came across a rehearsal journal from a previous show I worked on.  On the very first page I found this written as the initial concept for the performance:

In many of the old religions, GLBT persons held special roles as shaman/seers/etc because they were perceived as taking part of both male and female spirits.  In modern times, however, we are by and large a secular community, ostracized by the religious systems that have come into power in the past millennium, and frequently considered frivolous in our pursuits of pleasure.  But are these pleasures we pursue so frivolous or are they simply a modernization of the rites of old?  Sacred or Profane, who are we?

Sound familiar?  It’s awfully like the concept for Yes They Are! Meeting and Greeting the Queerest of the Gods, last year’s performances of which propelled the Circle of Dionysos into becoming what it is today.  But the concept above was written for a never performed dance piece I was developing back in 2003, before The San Francisco Gay Men’s Open Wiccan Coven, which was my first queer spiritual community, even existed.  The day I found this journal I was feeling depressed and questioning a lot of my decisions over the past year or so.  It was lovely to find such a clear message that yes, I am on the right path!

Agave in the throws of Madness

We are dedicating this production to all Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer people who have been shunned, harassed, and sometimes killed. At times, our family members have denied our existence and our friends have cast us aside. We have sometimes been told not to be who we are. We have sometimes been denied employment, housing and medical care.

I play Agave in our production of The Bacchae. Agave is the daughter of the former King, Cadmus and the mother of Pentheus, the current King. Pentheus and Agave have denied the divinity of Dionysos. They have failed to properly honor Semele, the mother of Dionysos and sister of Agave, who died. Dionysos drives Agave mad. In her madness Agave kills her son because she thinks he is a lion. My character goes from lunacy to grief.

I am dedicating my performance to the LGBTQ Community. I dedicate it to you whose parents have not accepted you. I dedicate it to you who have lost friends because of your sexual orientation or gender identity. I dedicate it to you who have been killed and were anonymous because you lost your entire support system. I dedicate it to LGBTQ people who have given their lives to serve the community. I dedicate my performance to LGBTQ parents who have been denied access to their kids and to LGBTQ people who are not allowed to adopt because of who they are. This is for you.

I offer my body as a receptacle for those LGBTQ spirits who have been harmed or damaged. Please help me inspire and portray the truth. Please help us as we try to change hearts and minds and bring our world justice and equality.

Amethyst Moonwater