[Coming Home to America cover]

Harnessing the Spirit of Community

From Chapter Three of Coming Home to America by Torie Osborn

Building community is an exciting activity that is individually empowering as well as socially responsible. Every day, rap session facilitators, social or recreational group leaders, hotline volunteers, board members of community-based organizations, and "professional" lesbian and gay activists like myself get involved and then stay involved for years -- and even decades. What is it about the project of community-building that is compelling and transformative in our lives?

Working for the Good of Others Builds Competence and Self-Esteem

First, creating community fosters tremendous personal growth. Again and again we hear: "I set out to help someone else and I grew so much myself." Almost inevitably, active involvement leads to a surprising and powerful outcome: individual development. On a practical level, service to community adds enormously to our individual toolkit of personal, psychological, professional, and leadership skills. As an extra added bonus, doing good feels good.

In my college days, I was shy and tongue-tied, utterly incapable of speaking up in class. I lacked self-confidence in every way, I honestly don't know who I would be today if I hadn't stumbled into Burlington's lesbian-feminist community in my early twenties, just coming out. My self-confidence was seeded by that experience.

As part of the culture and ethos created then, with their deep connections to the burgeoning new women's liberation movement, we encouraged each other to develop as many concrete skills as possible. In one exciting year, I worked with a friendly feminist hypnotherapist to overcome my terror of public speaking, learned basic carpentry so that I could literally build a room of my own onto my lover's house, took apart my VW Bug's engine and put it back together, studied karate and judo for self-defense, played a conga drum (sort of), avidly studied Robert's Rules of Order to chair an endless number of meetings, and played in weekly dyke softball and baseball games.

The self-esteem I built through all those classes and activities is central to my sense of self today. It didn't matter that I discovered I was lousy at auto mechanics (beyond changing tires and oil), had a long way to go to be a good meeting chair, and lacked the patience to excel at carpentry. I learned that I could learn new things, and I learned about the richness of available knowledge when it's shared. I also learned things that in later years would become vital to me both personally and professionally -- how to mentor and be mentored, how to take pride in accomplishment, how to take risks, deal with failure, think on my feet, admit my limitations, and acknowledge my strengths. In our lesbian subculture we pushed each other to take every opportunity to develop all kinds of esteem building skills -- skills that turned out to be highly transferable as the years wore on, even though I never, ever spent one more day tearing down my car engine.

In retrospect, although we weren't conscious of it then, we were incorporating into our very notion of community the mandate of individual empowerment through skill-building, the importance of taking responsibility for others, and the significance of developing leadership. Self-esteem grows directly out of accomplishment, learning competence, and actively affirming those things in each other -- and those values continue to be a critical function of lesbian and gay community building today. Leadership, too, is a vital and precious resource, of which we are finally more willing to be supportive and proud, and which we are more consciously developing.

I was not alone in my experience. Tens of thousands of lesbians, imprinted by that subcultural experience of lesbian-feminist community in the 1970s, have brought our ideas and our joyful experience of community with us as we have put the "lesbian" into "gay and lesbian" organizing, worked in the women's, disability rights, environmental, and other social movements, and developed our professional and personal lives. A whole generation of us are quietly, and not so quietly, bringing leadership to a host of areas in the 1990s, and we would not be the women we are if not for that early shared community-building.

Hands across the community. This same process of personal development is occurring within gay and lesbian community groups every day. If you have been involved in a gay or lesbian organization over a period of years or even just a few months, stop and look at the personal growth among the members, and particularly those who have taken on leadership roles of any kind.

Carol was a middle-aged woman with two teenage kids who landed in a lesbian rap group at Connexxus, a lesbian center in L.A. in the mid-1980s. She had finally left the oppressive life of a long marriage to an abusive husband, and she was working at a number of jobs. But she lacked confidence; she felt confused, unfocused, searching for a larger place to plug in and get inspired. Within a matter of weeks, she volunteered to take the rap group facilitators' training class, went on to conscientiously run the weekly rap group for a year, and then took a leadership position on the board of directors. In the course of this work, Carol not only developed facilitation and organizing skills, she also built substantial self-confidence, decided to become a lawyer, and went back to school. Today, she is a successful partner in a law firm, and a dynamic community leader.
Scotty was a shy, tongue-tied teenager, a regular member of the young men's rap group that meets Fridays at the L.A. Center. For two years, he struggled through shame and self-doubt; then, with the encouragement of one of the group's facilitators, he started volunteering in the youth shelter. The adult staff encouraged him to start college, and he continued to volunteer at the Center through his entire four years at UCLA. On graduation, he immediately took a staff position in the Center's youth services department, where he initiated a mentoring program to pass on the lessons and leadership skills he himself had learned.

This hands-across-the-community approach has brought hundreds of us into leadership and activism, and through that process we have discovered that we not only gain skills and self-esteem, we feel good. It feels great to work to change the world; it feels great to give back to our community; it feels great to be of service to others. Our sense of self, our estimation of our own value in the world, are heightened by the simple act of giving back. Pour out the cup and find it ever full.

Perhaps we get some quiet satisfaction by simply being out gay people involved in a gay group in this crazy, homophobic world. Maybe we like knowing we're active in America's newest social revolution, even if we didn't set out to do so. We still face such powerful antigay forces both within ourselves and from the world outside that we become freedom fighters just by walking out of our closet and into any gay or lesbian community activity. Simple participation can give a strong measure of pride and positive self-regard and has inestimable value in nurturing character and confidence.

The actual skill-building and the enhanced self-esteem that come from service to the community translate into increased professional success as well as personal development. Plus, there's an additional reward: whether consciously or not, when we help to build the local gay chorus, or facilitate the lesbians-over-forty group, or write a letter on behalf of our town's GLAAD chapter, we are acting as an ambassador of goodwill for our people. We are representatives of lesbians and gay men, providing an example of moral strength to the world. The message we send is that we are people who value helping our own and building community. It's a message we send to ourselves as well.

Collaboration with others gives a sense of purpose. We develop useful skills and competence, we are altruistic, we feel fine. So far, so good. But there is a magnificent additional benefit to working with others to help craft community: doing so adds a heightened sense of meaning to life. In this patriarchal world, which overvalues rugged individualism, we are not taught to expect the powerful force created by working with others to build something socially useful. Life is often hard, and life for gay men and lesbians is even harder. It becomes easier, and infinitely more enjoyable, when we get active in building something greater that ourselves. Working collaboratively with others toward a social purpose feeds our deepest spirit.

People need to be a part of something larger than themselves; this is just as much a part of our nature as the need for individual expression. Engaging in group activities, we are individually empowered, and often transformed. Sometimes this can operate at a pretty basic level. For example, sometimes just leaving that lonely apartment and going to the neighborhood gay potluck after we've spent the whole afternoon cooking our secret-recipe casserole can give us a warm sense of connectedness and even some perspective on our life.

Again and again, people say they stay involved over a long period of time in community or advocacy work because of their feelings of connectedness to others and to a higher sense of purpose. Above the individual benefits, the synergy created by a group project is enormously rewarding. Rather than detracting from the individual, the unifying energy thus created empowers the involved person, even when there is a diminishment of individual ego. This is one of those ancient paradoxes: willingness to surrender to a spirit of group cooperation energizes the individual.

Community-building endeavors can even be the highest form of sacred or spiritual experience. For a moment, an hour, a weekend, or a lifetime, community-building can put people in touch with a sense of transcendent purpose. This transcendent purpose emerges from the joyful experience of building community collaboratively. This feeling, this spirit, is transformational for the individual and for the group, capable of unifying people across great differences and moving us to true community. This transformational, transcendent quality is the brightest promise of community.

The "Glory of Community"

I first experienced this magical transformational quality during my involvement with lesbian-feminist "women's music" in the early 1970s. Like thousands of lesbians coming out at that time, I will remember my first Cris Williamson concert forever. It was 1974; a raucous group of women friends piled into my baby-blue VW Bug and a few other cars and drove from Burlington, Vermont, to Boston to hear the West Coast folk-rock singer in concert.

As Cris sang, more than a thousand women linked arms and swayed in unison to that lyrical, soaring music. It was unlike any experience I'd ever had; it was sheer magic. Women walked out of that concert with a throat-catching, shining joy in being lesbians, a feeling far, far bigger than pride. New courage and confidence germinated in that music and in the revolutionary empowerment that came from gathering so many women-loving women together. Within days of that concert (and hundreds more like it over the years), women walked out of marriages or relationships with men that, they suddenly realized, had been nothing but a lie for a long time. They walked off jobs with no futures, or where they were being sexually harassed long before there was a name for it or a movement to fight it. They came out to themselves and to each other. They exulted in limitless new possibilities of a freedom never before tasted, and they made the decision to change their lives forever.

There was a spiritual quality to that music as well, a healing, hopeful, barrier-breaking quality that unified people with an energy greater than each of us. It broke down walls of separation among and between us and created a sense of collective higher purpose. That night, a staid concert hall at Harvard University became the seedbed in which sprouted a revolutionary new spirit that touched the hearts and souls of a brand-new community of women. That night, I knew my life would never be the same again; I'd discovered a compelling force with great power to mobilize people. For years already, marching and organizing against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, and for women's liberation felt important and empowering, but this new-found community touched my soul in such a different way that I couldn't wait to get active in the emerging "women's music" phenomenon. I spent the better part of the next ten years as a concert, festival, and record producer and promoter. So my own life was changed as well.

Over the years, I've seen that same transcendental, powerful force generated by the collective power of a group operating in myriad ways -- at conferences, group retreats, rallies, religious services, AIDS memorials, staff meetings, and street demonstrations. With skilled leadership and facilitation, or even by chance when a lucky mix of people and circumstance collide, this spirit of purposefulness, this wonderful group intimacy, is achieved. Once can feel the energy in a room, a magnetic force field of bonding that both energizes the individual and unifies the group regardless of differences. This energy can quietly vibrate or be electrifying, suddenly enveloping a room or rally site or restaurant table with a jolt of radiant power. Transcendent community spirit is an energy not sufficiently discussed because it has a magical, almost mystical nature. But, increasingly as people become more and more comfortable with the notion of integrating spiritual elements into our community or political work, we will develop a more sophisticated collective conversation about it. It is real; we've all felt it -- we just haven't figured out yet how to sufficiently harness and use it.

From my own experience I know that this force is not a rarefied, occasional occurrence, but can be a kind of everyday magic. This transcendent energy occurs when a critical level of honesty and openness and a collaborative spirit are achieved. Because more and more of us are walking through the terror of coming out to new courage and open-heartedness, this spirit is operating more and more in everyday life -- in our interactions with each other, in the way we do organizing or leadership work. It is happening more often because the simple truth of our lives -- our great love, our caring, our creativity -- shine out in stark contrast to the shrill din of lies about us and the growing violence against us. It is happening more and more because of the increased intensity and search for meaning we are engaged in as we daily face death and dying in this era of horrific plague. This quality we find in our community work has been called group intimacy or queer collective spirit. To me, that transformative synergy is the essence of what the gay community can achieve -- and it is exactly what we should strive to achieve as we shape our organizations and institutions, our culture and our movement in this challenging time.

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