I’m becoming more of a question guy than an answer guy (ironic, “Ford Knows”—you all got that, I assume.)
But…before I launch into my latest thought salad, I feel compelled to make note of the frequency with which I use the word “I”—six times, just now, including the first and last words of that opening. Oof.
“Ugh,” I imagine people saying, “This fucking “I” guy—I, me, my, mine—when’s he going to make it about us?” So I guess I just want to make explicit my thoughts on that subject, and Jesus, am I now super self-conscious about every “I” and “my” I use. Christ!
The problem, of course, is that old adage, “Write what you know.”
I resisted picking a Substack “major” back when I wrote my early post about niches (“A NICHE! A Niche! My Queendom For a Niche!”) because I just didn’t feel capable of proclaiming myself an expert on any one thing, and didn’t want to limit myself besides.
The only subject I am indisputably the world’s greatest expert on is Mr. Troy Ford, an obscure, anxious, mildly amusing wordist living in Spain with his Italian-American husband and his American Staffordshire Terrier, currently querying his first unpublished novel, and trying to cure a decades-long bout of writer’s block and misdirected career paths with a steady writing practice on Substack.
When I told our would-be landscaper back in Oakland what I planned to do in Spain (“teach English part-time, and write”) he said, “Oh. So nothing, basically.” (He ultimately abandoned us, he said, to focus on starting a food truck business, though I suspect our budget to install a little order and drought-resistant color into our garden was just too low for him to bother. Meanwhile, the pandemic put a kibosh on my English teaching—I wonder what our part-time landscaper/falafel salesman would say about that now?)
The point of this digression, I suppose, is to say that by sharing the Byzantine machinations of my brain, I want to entertain, maybe inspire, and yes, definitely amuse (“humor” being the only niche I was willing to declare in that early post) and let you all know when I say “I,” I usually mean “WE.”
Fiction is fiction, of course, a perennial standard by which an individual may focus their thoughts, ideas and words into a format society has generally accepted as not egregiously self-centered, at least when it is well done. I am publishing more fiction here—more on that Coming Soon—while my “thought salads,” I hope, are both novel and savory enough to hold your attention and earn your affection over the long run.
I TRY, anyway, to shine a light on me and my life in order to reflect on things in a way that resonates with YOU because WE are all in this together. Every one of us is trying to make the best of an increasingly chaotic, interconnected cacophony of life—every one of us is far more complex than we appear, or even know ourselves to be.
FORD KNOWS is my attempt to bring a little light where there has been much darkness.
Now, strap yourselves in for a big bowl of gay rage.
Arthur Evans (1942-2011) was a curious character in the gay rights movement—always at the center of things, rarely in the spotlight.
Evans was protesting and organizing for civil rights before Stonewall; he formed the gay Faery Circle before the Radical Faeries got started; he staged an audacious performance of Euripides’ The Bacchae at the Valencia Rose Cabaret in 1984 (based on his own translation from the Greek) which featured doomed King Pentheus in Dianne Feinstein-drag to protest the late Senator’s move to close the gay baths in San Francisco during the AIDS crisis. Even putting specific politics aside, he was an incredibly erudite scholar, passionate and active in his beliefs.
I first became aware of him through a gay book club meeting in the Castro around 2000, when someone nominated his 1988 book The God of Ecstasy: Sex Roles and the Madness of Dionysos for their month’s selection, and it completely turned my head upside down about homophobia.
How to summarize the gist of his argument as succinctly as possible?
With a 7-page bibliography, complex analyses of original Greek phraseology and citations, and his new full translation of The Bacchae, he lays out a history of the worship of Dionysos, god of ecstasy, wine and intoxication, dance, theater, and homosexuality, as well as the evolution and sublimation of this multi-faceted, primordial archetype and deity from pre-Greek antiquity to our current Christian-based regard.
Evans’ text includes numerous pictures from the Valencia Rose production in 1984 (only one of which I was able to find already online and so I hesitate to reproduce others from copyrighted material,) and a close reading of The Bacchae itself, one of the greatest of all Greek tragedies.
At the heart of the story is the struggle of the god Dionysos to gain recognition of his divinity as the son of Zeus from the family of his mother, Semele, including his aunt, Agave, and her son, his cousin King Pentheus of Thebes.
According to Evans, in a metaphorical sense, it is the conflict between the ancient, indigenous, matriarchal precursor religions of the Great Mother/Divine Son, and the new, conquering, patriarchal systems of sky gods then ruled by Zeus, imported with the Greek language.
The story begins with Dionysos’ rejection by the prevailing Greek patriarchy of Pentheus and family, and ends with the horrific revenge imposed on them by the god for failing to recognize his power based in the divine feminine. There’s madness, cross-dressing, earthquakes and fires, deception, bloody murder, and most interestingly, ritual ecstatic dancing in wild mountain glades.
Evans traces the evolution of the Dionysos archetype from prehistoric, agricultural, Earth-centered identities—earlier, near-Eastern gods of vine, beer, honey and mead, and a Minoan bull god (echoed in the Minotaur)—to the Greek bull-horned Dionysos of The Bacchae with his ecstatic, wine-fueled rites, and ultimately on to the fracture of his image by Abrahamic religions into two wildly opposing figures: Jesus the Lamb, son of God (sound familiar?) and Satan, the horned one, the evil agent tempting people away from the grace of a now male Supreme and his Divine Son into such abominable sins as buggery and drunkenness. Hmmm…
What really brought it all back around for me was the 2015 movie The VVitch (**slight spoilers ahead!**)
I had originally included it in last week’s post about movies that moved me, but realized I wanted to write separately about its themes in connection with Arthur Evans’ book.
A Puritan family is kicked out of their settlement for being TOO Christian (if you can imagine) and is slowly destroyed with temptations unleashed on them by Satan and a retinue of witches that ultimately claims the oldest daughter as one of their own.
In a chilling scene at the end, that daughter, Thomasin, makes a pact with “Black Phillip” the family’s horned ram (Satan in disguise) and walks into the forest to join a Witches Sabbath, a group of naked, raving mad women dancing around a fire.
When I saw that, I said: Oh. The Bacchae, obviously.
The whole concept of witchcraft and satanism is a smear campaign, turning ecstatic enjoyment of the fruits of an effeminate god’s bounty into a murderous conspiracy of evil, right on down to the new Speaker of the House, who has called same-sex marriage a “dark harbinger of chaos.”
Isn’t it just like the Alpha Bro Club to take something which empowers women, gay men, trans and other oppressed, marginalized groups (the Dionysian mysteries were mainly practiced by women and the conquered populations of slaves and laborers under Greek rule) and turn it into something evil and Other?
In fact, when the bloodthirsty violence of armed aggression gets a little out of hand, they’ll turn that into a witch’s consort, too: Vlad the Impaler becomes Dracula, a vampire, because even the patriarchy doesn’t know what to do with its worst impulses on steroids—meanwhile, it’s always the male scholars of warfare who describe, with visible awe, how Vlad’s horrifying “forest of the impaled” was some kind of tactical stroke of genius against the sensibilities of his enemies.
Toss that epic bad boy Vlad into the PR mill, and we’re just a Victorian novel away from transforming a son of battle-hardened princes into a supernatural villain, an undead Satan with his own cohort of witch brides, ta-da—nope, not one of us, one of them.
Rage, hate and violence attempt to conquer fear of the unknown, the Other, THEM; conquering is colonialism; colonialism is capitalism; capitalism is progress, penicillin, the Pill, and iPhones—of course, of course, it all seems so clear, but what do we do about it?
(Remember when I said question guy, not answer guy?)
I’ve always wondered: what would the world look like if we didn’t have the progress, competition and conquering under a patriarchal machine, but rather, enrichment, cooperation and sharing in an organic, Earth-centric, “feminine” system?
Maybe we wouldn’t have penicillin, and that would suck. But maybe we wouldn’t have war, either, and wouldn’t that be wonderful? It’s so tempting to say that everything touched by the patriarchy eventually turns into a bloody brawl, at the very least, but it is all a very tangled web to unravel.
Even Substack, with its ❤️s and paywalls, its Subscriber counts and How To Get Mores and check mark verifieds: theoretically, we came for the words, but Substack’s gotta make a living too (and hopefully, a fortune for its founders) and the only way to do that is to monetize, fame and flame it up, throw a lightning bolt into a cozy campfire and turn it into a nuclear reaction.
(Old joke: Why can’t drag queens just be women? Why do they all have to be ⭐MOVIE STARS⭐...?)
Must we always strife and strive to be Heroes and Stars, CEOs and celebrities, whatever the cost? When have we arrived? How many BILLION$ equals a Titan…?
Is more always better? What is enough?
Maybe: Let’s all be witches.
(Well, that wasn’t so bad after all, was it? Less gay rage than gay harumph.)
Came for the Lamb, but Dio too?!?! 🤩 I’m totally in the right place.
I'm a few days late to the party here and the comments are amazing! I have a tired brain so don't feel like I will be able to offer anything worthwhile but want you to know I love this piece. So often I have thought about what it would be like to live in the time of the witches and faeries before the smear campaign began. It's difficult to even imagine how different it would be.
Amazing how one comment from landscape/food truck dude can wiggle in and shake things up. I guess that's one of the tricky things of being human and when something like that happens it's calling us to dig deep and heal yet another broken part. Sometimes I hate it when that happens🤣
"Let's all be witches." Yes, sign me up.