4) While they can be reflections of neurotic or self-hating patterns, they may also be enactments of spiritual or important phenomena. Sex with animals may be the beginning of interspecies communication; some dolphinhuman breakthroughs have been made on the sexual level. One guy who says he digs shit during sex occasionally says it's not the taste or texture. but a symbol that he's so far into sex that those things no longer bug him. Sado/masochism, when consensual, can be described as a highly artistic endeavor, a ballet the constraints of which are the thresholds of pain and pleasure.
Our Ghetto
We are refugees from America. So we came to the ghetto-and as other ghettos. it has its negative and positive aspects. Refugee camps are better than what preceded them, or people never would have come. But they are still enslaving, if only that we are limited to being ourselves there and only there.
Ghettos breed self-hatred. We stagnate here, accepting the status quo. The status quo is rotten. We are all warped by our oppression, and in the isolation of the ghetto we blame ourselves rather than our oppressors.
Ghettos breed exploitation. Landlords find they can charge exhorbitant rents and get away with it, because of the limited area which is safe to live in openly. Mafra control of bars and baths in NYC is only one example of outside money controlling our institutions for their profit. In San Francisco the Tavern Guild favors maintaining the ghetto, for it is through ghetto culture that they make a buck. We crowd their bars not because of their merit but because of the absence of any other social institution. The Guild has refused to let us collect funds or pass out gay liberation literature in their bars-need we ask why?
Police or con men who shake down the straight gay in return for not revealing him; the bookstores and movie-makers who keep raising prices because they are the only outlet for pornography; heads of "modeling" agencies and other pimps who exploit both the hustlers and the johns-these are the parasites who flourish in the ghetto.
San Francisco: Our ghetto certainly is more beautiful and larger and more diverse than most ghettos, and is certainly freer than the rest of America. That's why we're here. But it isn't ours. Capitalists make money off us, cops patrol us government tolerates us as long as we shut up, and daily we work and pay taxes for those who oppress us.
To be a free territory, we must govern ourselves, set up our own institutions, defend ourselves, and use our own energies to improve our lives. The emergence of gay liberation communes, and our own paper is a good start. The talk about a?gay liberation coffee shop/dance hall should be acted upon. Rural retreats, political action offices, food cooperatives, a free school, unalienating bars and after hours places-they must be developed if we are to have even the shadow of a free territory.