Michel Ray Oyatayo Ali Abu Maryam (Mickey) Weems (1957–2023)
2024; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 137; Issue: 544 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/15351882.137.544.09
ISSN1535-1882
Autores ResumoI became aware of Mickey's impending death in the Summer of 2022. With 5,801 miles (9,336 kilometers) between us—Mickey in Hawai'i and me in Newfoundland—our contact and friendship was mostly limited to American Folklore Society conferences and through our parallel scholarship on queer masculinities and 2SLGBTQI+ folklore. I have long been a fan of his ethnographic participant-based work on Circuit parties, as it is a vital element of contemporary queer ritual and empowerment. Mickey helped me understand a piece of the gay world that I have never directly experienced. During his final seven months, we met online to talk about his life philosophy, his approach to living with cancer, and how his voyage to the afterlife would tie together many of his ambitions. I learned a lot during these conversations, gaining a deeper appreciation for how his scholarship was intertwined with his personal and spiritual experiences and perspectives. And while I set out to write about his approach to death and dying, Mickey gave me the guidance and support that I needed while processing death within my own family.Mickey was diagnosed with prostate cancer in the Spring of 2021. His doctors initially predicted that he would have six months to a year to live. Defying their expectations and rejecting most forms of treatment, he continued to work out, dance, and party for the next two years. In one of our conversations, he shared that "vanity keeps me alive. My desire to look good drives me to the gym, and my desire to display myself to a public that appreciates my hard work drives me to the dance floor. Without the gym and the dance floor, I would already be dead." Mickey had a confidence in his body, mind, and spirit that tied together his life experiences and scholarship. He claimed that he didn't fear death, that cancer gave him the freedom and energy to focus on what truly mattered—the celebration of beauty and the construction of legacy. When he talked about vanity, he would clarify how vanity is about appreciating and celebrating beauty in whatever form it might appear. He jokingly described himself as a narcissist—before detailing his belief in spiritual immortality and how all his roles in this world were preparation for his voyage into the next. Mickey believed that we should each seek out the confidence to recognize and embrace our many ways of contributing to humanity, to use our strengths without fear. Mickey's identities as ocean lifeguard, US Marine, folklorist, Irish Catholic, Candomblé initiate, and Sufi Muslim were all parts of his pathway to enlightenment and to becoming a bodhisattva in the Buddhist tradition. He was dedicated to helping others in this world and the next.Mickey was born on December 17, 1957, in Fort Smith, Arkansas, into the migratory life of a military family. They eventually settled in Jacksonville, Alabama. He earned a BA in philosophy at Berea College, Kentucky (1976–1981), and then joined the US Marine Corps, graduating from Parris Island in 1983. He lived his first 38 years as a straight man, and his subsequent scholarship can be read as a type of reconciliation—an examination of communitas, masculinity, and spirituality. As an MA student of Anthropology at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, Mickey studied Candomblé in Brazil, and was initiated as an ogã (male protector-mentor of Axé l'Oya). He then completed an MA in Comparative Studies and a PhD in Somatic Studies at The Ohio State University. His PhD dissertation, Fierce Tribe: Crack Whores, Body Fascists, and Circuit Queens in the Spiritual Performance of Masculine Non-Violence (2007), was an ethnography of gay male circuit parties. It focused on how gay masculinity was shaped through dancing, house music, physical vanity, sex, and drug use—tools for achieving communitas. These ritual events celebrated masculine physical strength and connection while rejecting violence. Mickey published some of his initial findings prior to completing his PhD, including the article "The Circuit: Gay Men's Techniques of Ecstasy," in Manly Traditions, edited by Simon J. Bronner (2005). Soon after graduating, he published Fierce Tribe: Masculine Identity and Performance in the Circuit (2008). With Joseph Goodwin's More Man Than You'll Ever Be: Gay Folklore and Acculturation in Middle America (1989), his book stands as one of two published ethnographies with a core focus on gay male folklore from the perspective of folkloristics.Many of Mickey's subsequent works further refine his ideas about masculinity. In "Taser to the 'Nads: Brutal Embrace of Queerness in Military Practice," published in Warrior Ways: Explorations in Modern Military Folklore, edited by Eric A. Eliason and Tad Tuleja (2012), he dives into military gay folklore and folklife. Drawing in part on personal experience, he contrasts the private world of enlisted men ("military-as-folk") and the official world of officers and bureaucracy ("military-as-institution"). Looking at language, ritual, and popular culture, he demonstrates the ways in which the institution's attempts to eradicate homosexuality are more damaging to the military community than any fears that might be held by individual recruits. He presents a series of examples that show how group solidarity and affection transcend the false archetypes of "masculine Straight warrior-hero and nelly homosexual antihero" (p. 159), thus dividing the institution between homophobic leadership and the recruits who mock or reject their homophobia.During our conversations, we often turned to the question of legacy for 2SLGBTQI+ individuals, and the significance of intergenerational queer knowledge and memory. In the gay community, we sometimes call this "the lost generation"—due to the long-term effects of HIV/AIDS and the suppression or loss of history, role models, and direction. In addition, 2SLGBTQI+ activism is often reinvented with each generation, as we are denied continuity through stigmatization and pandemics. Mickey shared: When AIDS took off, I became straight. I stopped having sex. . . . Eventually I came back, but I lost a lot of friends. . . . One friend took a cocktail and put a turkey bag over his head. Suicide to escape the pain. His partner found him, saw him struggling to breathe, and. . . . Assisted suicide—loving someone so much that you help them die. We are a community who does assisted suicide. We know about death. That's why I'm accepting it for what it is.Mickey feared that COVID-19—confounded by rising homophobic and transphobic discourses, regulations, and violence—would have similar consequences.Since the start of his academic career, Mickey documented and told these stories, such as by writing articles and editorials in gay media. Along with his husband, Kevin Mason, he founded Qualia in 2002, an organization to promote and celebrate LGBT folklife. They hosted conferences 2002–2010, in Columbus, Ohio, that emphasized performance alongside scholarship and activism. This was also the energy behind the Qualia Encyclopedia of Gay People (the full encyclopedia is accessible via internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20150630111747/http://www.qualiafolk.com:80/), and Mickey's followers are working to find it a new home. He also contributed a case study "Gay Rituals: Outing, Biking, and Sewing" to the Living Folklore textbook, edited by Martha C. Sims and Martine Stephens (2011). I continue to use this when teaching undergraduate courses. It is an engaging, concise, and accessible introduction to the significance of gay folklife and to helping build and restore intergenerational queer knowledge and connection.In recent years, Mickey shifted to more spiritual and philosophically based discussions, such as in his unpublished manuscript "Hunting with Cats: Communitas and Counter-Narrative." It is about storytelling, collective memory, communitas, and battles against patriarchy and colonialism. Likewise, it embraces queer perspectives that are often coded by cis-gender heterosexual normativity. Using six distinct case studies—historical narratives that he re-examines with the assistance of several co-authors—he demonstrates how going alone and subverting can help build and empower larger communities that reject the power and bias of men. The concluding chapter by folklorist Marilyn M. White describes the manuscript as a "journey over space and time . . . introducing us to ethnographers, saints, deities, heroes, and founders and creators of new ways of understanding the cosmos." Mickey's final written works, the "Book of Pueo" and the "Book of Ewe" are a series of philosophical and spiritual statements about his experiences and vision. They are unpublished, written while preparing for death.Shortly after receiving his fatal diagnosis, Mickey began to document his voyage in a podcast Mickeyisdying.com with his friend, death doula, and producer Donna Blanchard. They released 38 episodes from July 21, 2021, to June 25, 2023. Blanchard led Mickey through diverse topics, starting with his visions of yellow lilies blooming along his spine as the cancer grew, and how the flowers were tidied up through targeted radiation early on. Their conversations covered his blue bag (the needle and medication for medically assisted suicide), his experience with catheterization, the increasing difficulties of weightlifting, house music, and sex as the cancer grew, and his dedication to go out and dance until the very end.In one of the earlier episodes, Mickey focused on a near-death experience in 1984 when he was surfing between Maui and Lanai and was pulled out to sea. Fearing death and living on "borrowed time," he dedicated himself thereafter to the Hawai'ian concept kuleana—respecting and helping others until his last breath. In the final episode, he touched on Hawai'ian folklore and spirituality, how he was bringing friends together to create the Knights of Pueo, a group dedicated to communitas and human kindness, and to learning about and respecting Hawai'ian culture and ecology. Pueo is the endangered horned Hawai'ian owl. Mickey's walking staff had an owl face on one end, which he described as his constant companion and dance partner.In one of his more animated moments, during one of our final conversations, Mickey announced that he would end his life in 30 days, and talked about joining the pantheon of queer folklorists, specifically Gerald (Gerry) L. Davis (1941–1997), Polly Stewart (1943–2013), and Joseph (Joe) P. Goodwin (1952–2015).Mickey's final month began with a roasting—a "woke wake" where friends gathered to tell stories and where he distributed the first copies of his self-published superhero semi-autobiographical comic book Stigmata. He also did interviews with local media, as well as online interviews with Folkwise, and with the American Folklore Society.Mickey Weems ended his life in the early morning on March 20, 2023, through medically assisted suicide while surrounded by friends, covered in glitter, and dancing under a disco ball on a catamaran off the coast of Hawai'i. He asked that we think of his passing as a voyage, not death; the spirit continues but you need to know how to see, to hear, and to communicate with it. He requested that his bones be brought to sea so that he could reside there as a protector where he almost died—where he was meant to die—in 1984. And he asked that part of his ashes be placed at the base of "The Fourth Sign" sculpture (created by Tony Smith, 1976) on the campus of the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, alongside his cat Dahlia (whose ashes are already there). Adding a new twist to legend-tripping and ostension, he asks that we visit this sculpture and hit it. The sound will resonate through the structure, and he will respond if he is able. Mickey feared that the world would need more and more assistance as we face greater catastrophes within the next 30 years. As a bodhisattva, he will be waiting at the Fourth Sign sculpture to try and guide us to beauty, happiness, and safety.
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