Gays and Gal Pals

We're more than Carrie and Stanford

The Balance card from Stevee Postman’s marvelous Cosmic Tribe tarot; I’ve been using it for over 20 years.

Like any self-respecting gay, most of my best friends are women. (The rest are fab folk like myself. Mr. Dick, I’m looking at you – seriously, that’s his legit last name. I can’t say I’m not envious. I love you, doll.) I’m certainly not averse to straight guy friends, especially if they’re hot, but since childhood, I’ve always hung out with the girls. And they’ve always hung out with me.

There’s some low-hanging psychological fruit we can pluck about this relationship. Gay men and women share objects of attraction, so there’s an affinity there. Women get to have emotionally intimate relationships with men free of sexual mishegoss. Women and gays often frequent the same places – theaters, opera houses, art museums, fashion locales, food, drink, merriment – you know, the good stuff. (Yes, some women and gays are into sports, beer pong, and other brutish activities. How frightful.) More than one woman I know, one a dear friend of mine, another that of my husband, has said, “Other than procreation, what are straight men good for? I mean, seriously.”

Of course, shadows dwell in this relationship. I knew a woman who upon meeting me said, “Oh, I’ve always wanted my own Stanford!” I’ve also known gays who think they have license to grab a female friend’s breasts at a club because they’re not sexually into them. One woman I was friends with had an argument with her boyfriend in front of me and turned to me for support – classic triangulation. I’ve heard gays spout misogynist idiocies among themselves and even in the presence of their female (supposed) friends.

Lady, I’m not anyone’s Stanford. I’m me.

Deeper than all this, though, I suspect the soul bond between us grows out of ancient history when we all were magical people of power. This connection is only between women and the femme queens of the ancient world. The butch gays, army men and emperors, because of their embrace of patriarchy, are a different animal that are not the subject of this post; here, I’m talking about the lisping, hip-wiggling, nasal-voiced, runway-stomping, radical, fearless, unapologetic gays, the ones who, today, cruise a guy without caring if he’s gay or not, wear whatever they want so long as it’s dazzling, embrace a joie de vivre and vibrancy of expression that is both an inspiration and a threat.

These types, back in the day, pre-Judeo-Christian-Islamic colonialism, were priestesses of various goddesses. They were the galli of Cybele, the semnotatoi of Hekate, the assinu of Inanna, the kelabim of Astarte, the kimbanda of the Kwanyama-Ambo people of southern Angola, the wintke of the Lakota people, the jogappa of southern Indian goddess Yellamma. These gender-variant, same-sex loving people often worked alongside women priestesses and spiritual healers, many times acting as hierodules, spiritual functionaries who used sex as a way to effect powerful transformation. Warriors would come back from battle and need to re-embrace life through the literal embrace of a hierodule, some with female bodies, others with male bodies. It used to be that kings were only anointed after the priestess channeled the goddess and made ritual love to the hopeful, after which he was empowered enough to ascend to the throne.

We’wha, a third-gender Zuni, visiting Washington, D.C. in 1886. For more on this divine diva, read Will Roscoe’s The Zuni Man-Woman.

In many cultures, women and these queens (for lack of a pithy term) enjoyed friendships while weaving, making pottery, cooking, playing music, dancing, caring for the children. Hekate’s semnotatoi were legendary for leading choruses of flower-decked children in hymns to the goddess of crossroads and witchcraft, a kind of ancient show choir. Among the Kwanyama-Ambo, there’s evidence to suggest only women and the kimbanda were allowed to play the omakola, a stringed instrument used for magical ends. The jogappa sing and dance at weddings and prepare meals for devotees. Sound familiar? Gay men and women advanced the arts, not the arts of war but the arts of beauty, the arts that make life worth living. Joy. Wonder. Pleasure. These were and are our domains, going back thousands of years. This is in our blood. It’s woven into our souls.

Big Mama Durga of India has her “queer” priestesses. P.S. Don’t fuck with Durga.

Even in a post-Christian and/or secular society, we cannot help but enact these ancient practices in relationship to each other. How much more powerful would we be if we consciously banded together, if we chose to draw on the ancient forces stored in the collective memory of who we are? What could we not achieve? Too long we’ve sublimated our spiritual power beneath the ponderous weight of patriarchal traditions and leaders. Too long we’ve allowed scientific fanaticism, hyper-rationalism, and the fear of ostracization hobble our innate gifts. Too long we’ve succumbed to the false promises of hetero-normative capitalism, to the promises of white-picket fences and playdates. The desire to fit-in with the narrative laid out by imbalanced masculine power is the most insidious development in our destruction, a destruction perpetrated upon us by any patriarchal society, but most deleteriously by Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and their so-called “values.” Throughout the Middle East, Europe, and then wherever these traditions spread, women priestesses were murdered alongside the queer ones, so fearful of our influence were the socio-religious-economic engines of masculine might.

Especially in the shadow of J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley, Fox “News,” Project 2025, Trump, Steve Bannon, and other macho degenerates, we need to reinvigorate our past into our present, thereby saving our future. We need to ascend to our rightful place as priestesses, culture-workers, radicals, and sacred artists. I am heartened by the people I’ve met who are doing this, and I long for our numbers to swell. It’s high time we mend our singed robes and get back to work.

We’ve got spells to cast.