The editors at White Crane, a thoughtful and stirring quarterly (and 2004 Utne Independent Press Award nominee for spiritual coverage),team great writers with unexpected storylines to explicate gay spirituality.
Jonathan G. Silin’s piece on grief, “The Weight of Ashes,” (not available online), is reason alone to track down the latest issue (#74). After chronicling the struggle to legally assume possession of his lover’s cremated remains, the author then must face down the equally Herculean task of taking them from his closet shelf to dump them in the sea.
Stuart Timmons’s “Activist Love; The Loving Companions Harry’nJohn“(excerpt available online) profiles the celebrated, elder gay couple John Burnside and Harry Hay (“Harry’nJohn”), influential members of the gay community who worked to create a presence together since the early 1960s. A favorite line:
“The butch/femme tradition of [the 1930’s] dictated not so much that a butch was a masculine Gay man, but rather that he make every effort to believe he was actually a straight man taking advantage of a peculiar partner, often with the intervention of alcohol…. By the time he met John, Harry was determined to break out of this straight-acting culture…. It embodied a whole-hearted embrace of being Gay.”
—Jason Ericson
