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Hi David, glad to see you are back posting in the pods here.
I think you and I are on similar quests. I have also been trying to figure out why gay men appear to be primarily focused on sexualizing everything in their worlds and seem less interested in forming personal bonds on other levels. I was very glad to see that there are at least a few gay men who are seeking more spiritual connections when I joined zaadz.
I was wondering if there were more community events around the US that I was missing here in Arizona. Like you, my short experience with radical faeries was less that desirable. I never actually got to meet anyone or get over to Zuni but subscribed to the listserv and read many emails for several months and watched the dialogue intently. While I did see a few who seemed truly interesting individuals, my understanding through reading their posts back and forth was that the group was more focused on the types of activities that you described. This may be an unfair assessment as I did not actually meet or have any personal interaction with anyone from the listserv and I finally just unsubscribed.
When I moved to Tucson at the beginning of the year, I had hoped to find a group of gay men that were interested in discussing more spiritual aspects of gay life especially as it relates to healing. Tucson has seemed to be a bit more spiritually aware as a city than Phoenix however, I have not yet found those that seem genuinely interested in pursuing discussions about spirituality and healing and exploring aspects of our paths from our gay oriented aspects. I'm sure most of that is my issue since I do not go out to bars and am not very successful at chatting up others online. I still struggle with figuring out how to meet men outside of the usual venues of bar and bath.
I think that we are not easily finding these individuals in our gay society simply because they do not exist in great numbers. The lessons we teach each other upon coming out are not those of a spiritual nature and since we reap what we sew, we see a great deal of people languishing in sex oriented behaviors wondering why they are not meeting “Mr. Right”. The real question is how do we re-orient these behaviors and how to we help others come from that venue into a more self healing/spiritually aware frame of reference? This is, of course, assuming that they wish to find and follow this path.
I've been thinking for some time about starting a discussion group similar to a couple of groups that I have attended in the past. I'm not really sure of the agenda, or that it actually has to have one other than just talking about how we might find ways of reaching others who have similar interests and what activities we can pursue that would help move us away from the bar behaviors into a different path.
Do you have any experience with starting or participating in a group like this?
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