Sex Can Destroy Evil
A tour through the newsletter of Don Jackson's St. Priapus Church in the 1980s.
I’m in a season of momentous change. First, moving back to the USA after 14 years; I was so aware of how years of Tory austerity, Brexit, & the pandemic have impacted me and my friends in the UK, now I’m coming to terms with how my friends here have survived each American analog and more. Then, healing from surgery and the deluge of emotions built up over the course of my life that I only could have faced in the aftermath. An overwhelming happiness, relief, gratitude paired with grieving all of the circumstances, people, and acts of self-betrayal that made top surgery itself take so long to make happen. Both of these major, intertwined experiences are fodder for journaling, not writing or publishing, for now. Not Substack!
But Finally, I’m winding down one book and starting to see the contours of the next one take shape, a diptych’s emerging: one on witchcraft and spirituality filtered through my own experiences of teenage self-initiation plus working at an occult bookshop, the other a bigger picture, a history, a travelogue, and cultural criticism of the wider lineage of queer and trans artists engaging in witchcraft and DIY spirituality. It sounds pithy but what my writing group has read has been described as “fun and funny” too.
I basically left instagram because I got tired of making money for Mark Zuckerberg in crisis after crisis, let alone genocidal times, and its image and text limits didn’t suit me anyway. I’ve never wanted a job that relied on social media to function, I refuse to give it that much power. Now I’ve been putting off my Substack because the changes in my life are so big and the goings on in the world so bad that I don't know how to lighten up enough write for it. The goal with starting it was to create a space for a little sharing and experimentation. So here I am, back on it!!! Because an ongoing, sustaining part of my life no matter the state of the world, is that I like to find and delight in weird, out-of-the-way books and ephemera. Their scrappy materiality excites and enthuses me and has always been a source of permission: people have been writing whatever they want on whatever they can forever. It makes it easier for me to do that when I find my fellow travelers across space and time. I have to find them, in order to write what I want to write.
But I also have consumed a lot of information and news lately that very ungenerously antagonizes its readers, including me: assuming people don’t know what’s going on in the world, or haven’t faced enough of its cruelty, violence, death, haven’t felt painfully split in two between whatever daily tasks they’re supposed to partake in, and images of death and dying on an scale that’s hard to grasp.
I would like to circulate little pockets of knowledge and experience that assume that if you are reading this, it is highly likely that you already know too much, worry too much, suffer too much, and deserve a rest every now and then.
***
So: SEX CAN DESTROY EVIL, the creed and motto of the Saint Priapus Church of San Francisco, as I have learned it from a clutch of 21 newsletters I found issued from the Church between 1983 and 1987. The Saint Priapus Church is a combination sex club, ecstatic religious group, and gay social service. The newsletters are a collage of updates about the Church, its schedule, descriptions of its rituals and invocations, testimonials from its membership, along with articles about homosexuality in ancient cultures, sermons on same-sex love in the bible, and about various queer crises of the time: AIDS, homelessness, discrimination, and violence.
The newsletters dropped me into the workings of a cock-worshipping organization with mysterious origins. Francis Cassidy describes encountering a ‘Temple Priapus’ on a 1979 visit to San Francisco, inspiring him to start a Montreal chapter when he returned home which is still going strong. But even that organization claims a lineage dating back through SF in 1973, to Calgary in 1972.
Meanwhile, in the October 1983 issue of this newsletter, a clipping from The Advocate interviews Donald Jackson, who claims he started the Church in 1981 after an initiation in Italy in 1959:
“Jackson himself is a graying, clean-shaven man, garbed in the usual clerical collar and wing-tip shoes; only the tiny winged phallus around his neck reveals a touch of the exotic. He converted to phallic worship while visiting Gaerta in the Latinum province of Italy in 1959—by fate or by some other power, during the Feast of St. Priapus, also known in Italy as St. Cosmos….After the rites of the feast were over, Jackson spent hours discussing the religion with the nymphs (“as they use the word,” he explains, “a nymph is a person who was created wit ha craving for a penis in one or more of their orifices”). Fascinated, Jackson was initiated into the order that very day. “For 22 years I served my calling as a nymph. Then on a rainy August day in 1981, I went to the Field Museum of Cultural Anthropology in Chicago. In the South Pacific Room I was attracted to a sacred herma from the island of Nais. The gallery was empty, so I prayed to it. the spirit of the blessed St. Priapus fell upon me and spoke to me with an inner voice. He said I was called to the priesthood, commanded to preach the gospel and establish a church.”
As Jackson elaborates in a longer “Confession of Faith” from the July 1983 issue of the newsletter:
“Two priests and a man wearing a bishop’s crown came out, laid their hands upon my head and ordained me to the priesthood. The bishop told me i was ordained, but would not be a priest until I was called. ‘When will that be?’ I asked. Not for many years, he said. When you are called you will know it.”
***
These contradictions are typical: organizations with similar names and interests, happening around similar places and times, attested to by varying stories of conversion, foundation, and leadership. Squabbles and schisms are a very common form of collective religious experience. Visions are subjective experiences however objective the truths that emerge from them may feel. A few weeks ago I went with Michelle Tea to a store in Burbank called The Crooked Path to allegedly see Sharon LaVey speak about a book she’d written with her late husband, Stanton LaVey, grandson of Anton LaVey. The event was free and we thought: why not? It Will Probably Be Really Weird And A Little Fucked Up. And free. So we went to the shop and there was barely anyone there. Sharon LaVey never showed, nobody seemed to care but us. We waited an hour, to pass some of the time I got into a long conversation about Satanic gossip that resulted in buying a self-published book about the rift between the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple, mostly a compilation of emails and text messages—referred to as “the receipts.” It was just my latest experience of the truest thing about New Age and Pagan religious traditions: they’re so young, born so recently, we can see how fragile their foundations are—it’s one person's word against another’s, one vision in place of another. If you’re lucky, the cosmology allows for a plurality of perspectives, if you’re not, you either lose time in a cult or found a splinter group.
Over a decade ago now, I dove deep into the 17th-century origins of the Religious Society of Friends, called Quakers, for my dissertation, and it was a similar story. Joseph Smith’s grand Descriptive catalogue of Friends’ books (1867), the primo compendium of Quaker writing, begins with a key of symbols that perfectly illustrates a problem:
Explanation of signs used in this Catalogue.
* to indicate those individuals who at some time were disunited from the Society, and not known to have returned.
† those who were reinstated into membership
‡ those who were disunited, and returned, but believed to have again left the Society.
§ those individuals about whom there is some uncertainty as to whether they left the Society or not.
|| those Authors about whom there is some doubt as to whether they ever belonged to the Society; and those Anonymous Books with the same mark must be considered doubtful, i.e. whether written by Members or not.
Smith’s exhaustive system of signs makes it hard to imagine anything like a stable religious identity, other than one based on disagreement. As Thomas Trotter, a critic of the Friends, articulated the problem in 1672: “the Papist acknowledgeth one Pope in the World, the Quaker sets up a Pope in every individual Breast.”
There’s something really gay about this, and really witchy, a lot to draw from in understanding the New Age explosion of religious and quasi-religious groups as much as the revolutionary momentum of Gay activist groups, their creation, destruction, and reformation—heresy is viral, and once you know how to argue your point, you keep at it.
***
In the case of the Church of Priapus, or Priapus Temple, there is no word of division, only a series of stories with contradicting details. But the core spiritual pursuit remains the same: Phallic Worship. As advertised alongside the feature in The Advocate:
Sex Can Destroy Evil
Unfulfilled desires (lust) cause crime, war, violence, unhappiness. Destroy lust with sex or war will destroy us. Newsletter. Christian eroticism, phallic worship, art, poetry. Send $1 for sample copy. Saint Priapus Church, 583 Grove, SF 94102. 431-2188.
The Donald Jackson who moved from nymph to priest of Priapus between 1959 to 1981, is the same Don Jackson, a railroad worker from Bakersfield, CA turned underground journalist, co-founder of the LA chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, who at the West Coast Gay Liberation Conference in December 1969, had proposed the settlement of a gay colony in Alpine County, California. The Alpine Project, which became known as “Stonewall Nation,” aimed to set up a gay and lesbian voting majority of several hundred people in a small town, recall its local government, and replace it with gays and lesbians. It was a controversial idea at the time as would be now: many condemned the idea of gay separatism as imperialist and counter-revolutionary. Jackson’s vision gained more notoriety as an idea than as a reality. Mark Thompson describes the Alpine Project in The Gay Tribe: A Brief History of Fairies as an “elaborate fiction” that inspired later separatist projects of the 1970s; others have dismissed it as a media hoax. (“Brother Don has a Dream,” so went the headline of the two-page press release, which appeared in its entirety in the Los Angeles Free Press on August 14, 1970. Don Jackson wrote: "I have a recurring daydream. I imagine a place where gay people can be free.”)
Either way, Don Jackson dreamed big and the St Priapus Church was the longest-lasting vision he brought to life, combining sex and spirit and social justice in ecclesiastical drag. Writing for gay lib and counter-cultural newspapers across the 70s including the Advocate, San Francisco Free Press, Gay Power, and most of all the Berkeley Barb alongside the business of GLF activism must have prepared him to write, edit, design and circulate this newsletter.
In 1984, the newsletter gets a name: Phallos. By 1985, the ‘Gay Rescue Mission’ Jackson had set up as part of the Church, to address homelessness and hunger, was large enough to vote to separate and become its own organization; this was mostly because it was difficult to raise funds for these endeavors alongside the Church’s much-publicized glory hole, phallic art shows, jack off hotline and orgiastic services. As Jackson writes in the August 1985 issue:
“All churches, even during the time of Jesus and Paul, have had to contend with bickering between the elders. Usually the bickering is petty arguments over trivia. But a major schizm [sic] has developed in our church, and I am caught in the middle. In my mind, sex is to lust as food is to hunger. Lust, after all, is sexual hunger. The urges of the flesh-hunger, pain, fatigue, cold and lust—all are evils which must be fulfilled if we are to find bliss and happiness. So to me, propagating the Gospel, providing se for the lusty and feeding the hungry go together like a horse and carriage. Many in the church do not agree….Since the Pride Foundation collapsed, we are the only gay social service agency in San Francisco, and we are in it over our heads. The church is too small to provide all of the emergency social service needs of the Gay Community. To get funds and volunteers to get the job done, the church must loosen its control over the mission.
It is a bitter-sweet experience to see a son grow up and begin to assert his independence. But like a good and loving mother, we must loosen the apron strings a bit.”
From February to June 1987, the final issues I have of Phallos: St Priapus Newsletter, Jackson is up to his usual antics—running a glory hole, celebrating religious feasts, blessing cocks—and running a video Tape Club to distribute “a collection of inspiration tapes to evoke holy awe and devotion to the Source of Life.” He reprints letters written to other publications, and the old profile of himself in The Advocate from 1983, he copies articles about “Osiris Taking the Phallic Oath” and republishes a testimonial about how “jacking off has become a religious experience,” he advertizes a Video Festival at the Church headquarters where “The 36 best Gay films of all time will be shown…a benefit for the Gay Rescue Mission,” and for another group, the “Secret Gospel Church….an orgy of Brotherly Love” holding regular services on Thursdays at 2 pm, Fridays at 8 pm, and Sundays at 11 am.
And then nothing! The archival footprint of Donald Jackson is small: I have found only scant records of single copies of Phallos in the ONE Archive and GLBT Historic Society, nothing so comprehensive as my run of issues. There is a small cache of letters by Jackson at the New York Public Library, and a few interviews with him going up to 1994. No up-to-date biography, no obituary. These hungry, horny, complicated collages of the holy as the profane, the pornographic as profound, are the only vibrant sparks of life I can find of him. For now. But Saint Priapus Church is part of a much bigger constellation I’m mapping the stars of—queer and trans people calling for a liberation that is equal parts sexual and spiritual. I pray to find more of daily, more companions from the wide weird world of slutty mystics who agree with me that for over 2,000 years, the persecution of queer and trans people has been justified on religious grounds, so therefore our liberation must be spiritual as much as it must be political, with access to the divine alongside housing and healthcare.
