These are times in which the Christian claim that God embodies Godself as radically with and for us is desperately needed. Chaos, violence which threatens, turmoil and anxiety surround us.

State sponsored chaos: Jamal Kashoggi, the Saudi-born, US legal resident and Washington Post journalist whose murder was ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman… the seventeen investigations which keep getting closer and closer to the sitting US President who seems more and more desperate… US Military troops shooting tear gas across the border at unarmed Central American refugees…

And personal tragedy: the fifty-one year old friend who entered hospice this week… the brilliant gay man who addiction and depression finally caused his death by suicide last week…
Both in the ambient national atmosphere and in the personal lives of many I love, it seems as if chaos and violence; sorrow and turmoil are the state of the world.

The same is true of the world into which Jesus was born. And yet, in the Christian tradition, as she prepares to give birth, Mary is reported to have sung... in resistant, resilient joy: My soul proclaims your greatness, O God, and my spirit rejoices in you.
​
How does she do this? And why? Here are some reflections and possible answers to read or listen to: 
​http://www.lyndaleucc.org/sermons/advent-4-preparing-to-sing-the-world-right-side-up/

I'm honored to have contributed a re-interpretation of the Prologue to John's Gospel in this wonderful collection. As we seek to both resist the forces of colonization and to build a more just, verdant and joyous world, it is critical to engage our scriptural traditions-- particularly those texts that have literally baptized the violence and death of the colonizer. This book is an attempt at just such a task.

Here's what folkx are saying about it: For generations, the Bible has been employed by settler colonial societies as a weapon to dispossess Indigenous and racialized peoples of their lands, cultures, and spiritualities. Given this devastating legacy, many want nothing to do with it. But is it possible for the exploited and their allies to reclaim the Bible from the dominant powers? Can we make it an instrument for justice in the cause of the oppressed? Even a nonviolent weapon toward decolonization?

In Unsettling the Word, over 60 Indigenous and Settler authors come together to wrestle with the Scriptures, re-reading and re-imagining the ancient text for the sake of reparative futures.

Created by Mennonite Church Canada’s Indigenous-Settler Relations program, Unsettling the Word is intended to nurture courageous conversations with the Bible, our current settler colonial contexts, and the Church’s call to costly peacemaking. 

Contributors include:

Marcus Briggs-Cloud, Kathy Moorhead Thiessen, Kwok Pui-lan, Christina Conroy, Leah Gazan, Joerg Rieger, Norman Habel, Stan McKay, Rachel and Chris Brnjas, Jennifer Henry, Lori Ransom, Rebecca Voelkel, Peter Haresnape, Robert O. Smith, Susanne Guenther Loewen, Carmen Landsdowne, Cheryl Bear, Joshua Grace, Rarihokwats, Darren W. Snyder Belousek, Joy De Vito, Tamara Shantz, Marc H. Ellis, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Sara Brubacher, Benjamin Hertwig, David Driedger, Pekka Pitkanen, Celine Chuang, Alain Epp Weaver, Musa W. Dube, Katerina Friesen, Anita L. Keith, Derrick Jensen, Roland Boer, Neil Elliott, Daniel Hawk, Randy Woodley, Lisa Martens, Tobin Miller Shearer, Walter Brueggemann, Miguel A. De La Torre, Vivian Ketchum, James W. Perkinson, Sara Anderson, Deanna Zantingh, Peter C. Phan, Sheila Klassen-Wiebe, Bob Haverluck, Mark Bigland-Pritchard, Chris Budden, Ellen F. Davis, Rose Marie Berger, Wes Howard-Brook, Gerald West, Julia M. O'Brien, Dan Epp-Tiessen, Ryan Dueck, Mitzi J. Smith, Sylvia McAdam, Robert Two Bulls, Ched Myers, Jonathan Dyck, Sarah Travis, Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, Kyla Neufeld

​To order your copy, go to: https://www.commonword.ca/ResourceView/2/19793​ 

Palm Sunday has been hopelessly domesticated by much of the Christian tradition. But, in truth, Jesus' entry into Jerusalem is a brilliant, perfectly planned and executed non-violent direct action. Its wisdom has much to teach us as we seek to navigate in this political moment in ways that are creative and strategic.

​Read more here.

In the thirty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel, there is a powerful scene in which God leads Ezekiel out to a valley in which there lie the bones of the dead. They are described as very dry. In these times, it often feels as if we are being placed amidst the bones of the victims of Empire's death-dealing. But Ezekiel's experience isn't only about the power of Empire to kill and oppress, it's also a powerful strategy for resistance.

Read more here

​When Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina died in July of 2008, Peter Staley told this story:"On September 5th, 1991, I put a giant condom over Jesse Helms’ house.
Why? Because, as the condom said, 'Helms is deadlier than a virus.' Senator Jesse Helms was one of the chief architects of AIDS-related stigma in the U.S. He fought against any federal spending on HIV research, treatment or prevention. He once said, referring to homosexuals, 'it’s their deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct that is responsible for the disease.' Here’s another choice one: 'There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy.'

To read more about what this giant condom might have to do with Lenten practice, read more here: 
​http://www.lyndaleucc.org/sermons/inspired-by-love-and-anger/

These are very difficult times. The level of intentional targeting and traumatizing being done by this White House and their Neo-Nazi, White Supremacist base is exhausting. The backlash against the #MeToo campaign and the stories of so much pain that survivors experience can be overwhelming. And it's all amidst the season of Advent. What does it all mean and how do we survive and resist? As a way to answer some of these questions, I preached at Lyndale UCC in Minneapolis. You can read or listen here: Persistent Love
 

It feels very much like a Dietrich Bonhoeffer Advent. As I've been reading his work The Mystery of the Holy Night, I can't help but see the parallels between his grappling with what he ought to do as a person of faith in the face of Nazism and what we ought to do in the face of the rise of white supremacy and Nazism. As a way to further reflect on this question, I share the sermon below.



​

Awaiting the (Re)Birth of Love: Resilient Hope
Mark 1:1-8 and a Letter from Dietrich Bonhoeffer from Tegel Prison
to His Parents, Advent 1943
Lyndale UCC—Dec 3, 2017
Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel
 
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here…. Until the Child of God appear. Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel, shall come to you, O Israel.
 
What gives you hope? How does hope persist for you? How are you able to tolerate waiting in this Advent season?
 
Sometimes when there is a prescribed season of the church (like Advent or Lent), I have to get myself into the right mindset or framework because it just doesn’t match what I’m feeling or experiencing. Or sometimes I read an assigned scripture for the day and think, what does that have to do with my life or ours?
 
I have to tell you that neither of these things happened for me this week…
 
The yearning, the longing, the waiting for love to be born amidst a world that seems to have gone mad…. The persistent search for hope amidst the madness and waiting… it all seems to have been written for this moment.
 
Our scripture for this morning focuses on John the Baptist. You might remember that John dressed himself in the clothing of the prophets (camel hair tied with a leather belt) and ate locusts and wild honey in order to give people all the visual and cultural cues of the prophetic tradition. Something is radically wrong, John is proclaiming.
 
His people are occupied by the Roman Empire—with its military and its tax plan, with its sexual violence and conquest. And far too many religious leaders are corrupted by their colluding ways. Things feel apocalyptic, with things they hold dear being destroyed.
 
Repent, John pleads. Turn away from the Empire, he demands. Find a way to cleanse yourself of all this toxicity and, instead, help prepare the way for the One of justice and peace.
 
It has been a week of Empire and collusion in our lives, too…
 
Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor and the continued senate campaign of Roy Moore with his Christian preacher supporters who invoke Mary and Joseph to literally baptize pedophilia with Christian theology.
 
The Republican Tax bill which passed the Senate in the middle of the night that, if it survives reconciliation with the House bill, will push 11,000,000 people off health care, put money in the weathiest pockets, open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, just to name a few.
 
And then there was World AIDS Day on Thursday.
 
With each of these, and with many things these days, I find myself being transported to other places—flashbacks of a kind.
 
There are the Anita Hill hearings which I watched with such hope, wearing my “I believe her” button… there was that time in our shelter at Peoples Church in Chicago, whose numbers had swelled because President Reagan cut funding to affordable housing and homeless services. I sat at a table, as a teenager, with a homeless man whose fingers were black from severe frostbite because he had nowhere to go amidst the bitter cold. What can I do, he asked my fifteen year old self?
 
And there is Michael, one of my first patients when I worked as a chaplain at the VA in Seattle. He was in his late thirties and dying of AIDS. It came to me as a flashback this week how he recounted his early years in church when he was told of his sinfulness and worthlessness.  He shared his excommunication when it was learned he was gay.  And how his AIDS diagnosis only made it worse.  He spoke of simple cruelties and profound ones.  In place of care and love, ridicule and revulsion.  When he desperately needed tenderness, betrayal came, again and again. 
 
And then how he finally came to the questions, asked with genuine fear and trembling. Do you think I’m going to burn in hell?  Do you think by this time next week I’ll be in the outer darkness?   
 
It has been a week of Empire and collusion and collusion and Empire.
 
So how are we to hope? How are we to wait for the advent of justice and love?
 
On the eve of World AIDS Day, an HIV+ clergy colleague posted a story from Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott. He shared it as his testimony to the start of Advent amidst the marking of World AIDS Day. He shared it as one answer to what gives hope, of what is worth anticipating and waiting for.
 
These are the words from Anne Lamott: "One of our newer members, a man named Ken Nelson, is dying of AIDS, disintegrating before our very eyes...Ken has a totally lopsided face, ravaged and emaci­ated, but when he smiles, he is radiant. He looks like God's crazy nephew Phil...There's a woman in the choir named Ranola who is large and beautiful and jovial and black and as devout as can be, who has been a little standoffish toward Ken...She was raised in the South by Baptists who taught her that his way of life—that he—was an abomination. It is hard for her to break through this. I think she and a few other women at church are, on the most visceral level, a little afraid of catching the disease...So on this one particular Sunday... when it came time for the second hymn, the Fellowship Hymn, we were to sing "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." The pianist was play­ing and the whole congregation had risen—only Ken remained seated, holding the hymnal in his lap—and we began to sing, "Why should I feel discouraged? Why do the shadows fall?" And Ranola watched Ken rather skeptically for a moment, and then her face began to melt and contort like his, and she went to his side and bent down to lift him up—lifted up this white rag doll, this scarecrow. She held him next to her, draped over and against her like a child while they sang. And it pierced me."
 
“It is times like these that show what it really means to have a past and an inner legacy independent of the change of times and conditions. The awareness of being borne up by a spiritual tradition that lasts for [centuries] gives one a strong sense of security in the face of all transitory distress…” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
 
As we begin this Advent journey-- particularly amidst the power of Empire and the betrayals of collusion--we do so with another kind of flash back: We have a past, an inner and an outer legacy. While we wait the birth of love, we do so knowing that love has already been born.
 
While we seek hope, we do so coming back, over and over again, to the communion table… a place where the cradle and the solidarity of the cross are embodied. The communion table… a place where we know the reality of God’s radical, physical, palpable presence with us and in us and the reality that God will and does go into any pain and suffering we might encounter in order to transform it into new life.
 
And we are fortified and reminded and compelled to prepare the way. Amen.
 
 

Over the years, Beth Zemsky has been a mentor and friend in the work of religiously-rooted justice work. She is a practicing Jew, a lesbian and a movement thinker who has both challenged and inspired me to be more faithful and smarter as I've gone about my movment work. It was, therefore, an honor to be invited on to her Podcast. Here is a double episode where we delve into what it means to be about the work of building movements which are devoted to the liberation of real peoples' bodies-- individually, communally and as a planet.

Take a listen: http://bethzemskypodcast.com/bzp004/

During my first visit to Standing Rock in September of 2016, the people I met would ask me, "Where are you coming from?" What they meant was, who are your people? These reflections are my attempt to answer that question and discern how to best act in solidarity.

Sovereignty, Cultural Reclamation and Environmental Justice: Scottish Reflections on DAPL
Earlham College--March 27, 2017
Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel
 
Where are you coming from? 
 
I first visited the Oceti Sakowin camp in early September at the invitation of Rev. Marlene Whiterabbit Helgemo, pastor of All Nations Indian Church and the Director of the Council on American Indian Ministries in the United Church of Christ to be a “witness and interpreter” (as she called it) in support of the Water Protectors. The Water Protectors had started the Sacred Fire on April 1st of 2016 just outside of Cannon Ball, North Dakota which is just outside the boundaries of the Standing Rock Reservation in order to stop the illegal Dakota Access Pipeline. The impact to the Missouri River when a spill happens from the pipeline, will be catastrophic.  (turn to slide #3)
 
The first question we were asked was “where are you coming from?” After I answered Minneapolis a couple of times, a Native colleague said, “you know when you are asked that question, folks aren’t asking for where you live, they are asking who your people are.”
 
One of the things that Rev. Helgemo required of folks that came to Oceti Sakowin (which, in English means the Seven Council Fires) and stayed in her camp-within-a-camp was that we stayed for at least three days. She didn’t want theological tourists. My first three-day visit was literally life-changing.
 
Our first stop in camp was at the Sacred Fire which was very close to the entrance gate. ​ It was a space in which a microphone had been set up and elders of the Standing Rock nation were receiving delegations from indigenous nations across the world. When we walked up to the circle, a delegations of Mayans from Guatemala presented themselves and asked to be allowed into camp. When the Standing Rock elders welcomed them, they were given a Mayan flag that was then hung along the entrance road.
 
After their flag had been accepted a Lakota elder from a different reservation took the microphone and invited anyone who knew it, to join her in song. She explained to those who didn’t know Lakota that the words they were about to sing were:
 
“We are alive…. We are alive…. We are alive.”
 
As the song was picked up by people all around me, I realized the other, equally important reason I had come—to stand in solidarity with Native leaders.
 
The song “We are Alive” brought me to tears. In the face of over 500 years of attempted genocide, broken treaties, concentration camps, forced marches, boarding schools, cultural genocide—most of it perpetrated by my fellow Christians—this was a gathering that said that Native Lives Matter. It was a camp of shared food, shared clothing, shared school supplies and it was filled with music and ceremony and prayer.
 
At one point, we were all invited down to the riverside to welcome representatives of several Pacific Coast nations who had brought their boats from as far away as Alaska and then paddled across Lake Oahe (which was created by flooding the Missouri River at the Standing Rock reservation). These nations  were coming up the Cannon Ball River, a tributary of the Missouri to bless the water and stand in solidarity with Standing Rock. As they paddled past us, people shouted out blessings and one child in particular greeted each new canoe with “Water is sacred. Water is life.” Lalalalalala “Water is sacred. Water is Life.”
 
As the evening closed, we were invited to a pipe ceremony. The invitation alone was an act of deep honoring. I knew that as a white, non-Native person, that was sacred space that is not mine. And I couldn’t help praying as the pipe came to rest in my left hand, that I would do justice to the honor bestowed upon me as a witness and interpreter of this sacred, revolutionary space.
 
As I returned to Minneapolis and de-briefed with trusted friends and colleagues, I kept hearing the first question asked of me, “Where are you coming from?”
 
I began to understand the message underneath the question: that we must know who we are as we purport to do the work of justice in the world.
 
A second underlying message in the question came to me explicitly from a Native colleague in Minneapolis. As he and I were preparing for a presentation he was going to give to the United Church of Christ in Minnesota, he said, “You know one of the primary differences between Western or European understandings and Native understandings is you believe that time is linear. There is a past, a present and a future and they happen one after another. For Native peoples, time and history are embodied in place. The past, the present and the future are in the land and they live in our bodies.”
 
And I kept hearing the question, where are you coming from? Who are you, Rebecca Mary MacKenzie Voelkel? What history lives in your body?
 
I realized that, for me, my solidarity with Standing Rock needed an answer to this question.
 
I grew up as an only child. My mom is an only child of Scottish immigrant parents. My grammie, my mom’s mom, was the only one of her siblings to have children. And her mother was the only one of her siblings to have children. Because of this reality and the fact that my grammie took care of me as a child and I spent a lot of time with her, I was raised to know my Scottish heritage.
 
Grammie was born in Inverness, Scotland in 1905. In her many stories, she often told me that her father’s first language was Gaelic and that his English wasn’t that good. She loved to recount the story of going to visit her father’s family in Applecross, a tiny village on the side of the mountain on the West Coast of Scotland. 
 
On one particular evening, she was taking a walk with her uncle Murdo who spent most of his time dressed in tartan and hiking in the mountains since his job was to be the hunter for the wealthy land owner. As the darkness fell, Uncle Murdo turned to Grammie and said, “would you like to talk with Robbie Burns?”
 
Now, Robbie Burns was one of my Grammie’s favorite poets. She had memorized dozens and dozens of his pieces—many of them in Gaelic. As he was known as the Scottish national poet, you can imagine that my grammie would have been thrilled to talk with him.
 
But she responded to Uncle Murdo’s request with deep fear, “Uncle Murdo, Robbie Burns has been dead for over a hundred years.” To which Uncle Murdo replied, “Ay, Lassie, a spirit like that never dies.”
 
I’d heard that story many, many times. But as I grappled with where was I coming from, I started to do some reading.
 
And there’s a bit more to the story of Uncle Murdo and my great-grandfather. As I said, they had grown up in Applecross, on the West Coast of Scotland. But our family had originally lived in the Western Islands.
 
The story of how they got to Applecross is rooted in a century of brutality known as the Highland Clearances. In the mid-eighteenth century, as punishment for participating in the Scottish Clan uprising against English colonization, the Scottish wealthy class began clearing people, including my MacKenzie relatives, from the communal lands in the Highlands and the Western Islands. Then, those same lands were given to wealthy people to develop large-scale sheep farming.
 
The Clearances were marked by violence and brutality and often removed whole villages off their land on short notice. People were often left homeless, without any source of income or food. And, if they stole food to feed their families, many were arrested and sent to penal colonies in places like Australia. Additionally, wearing tartan was outlawed and punishable with arrest and deportation. And speaking Gaelic was discouraged and suffered greatly. 
 
This use of forced displacement and cultural destruction as punishment for liberation struggles, coupled with rewarding the wealthy who are already aligned with the colonizer, are old, old tactics.
 
Robbie Burns, by the way, wrote much of his poetry during the Highland Clearances, in Gaelic. And his voice was one of resistance and resilience and cultural reclamation. These, too, are old, old tactics.
 
So, in September and October, the answer to the question of where are you coming from was that I was the great, great granddaughter of those who’d been cleared from their land, whose language had been outlawed, whose traditions and clothing had been outlawed but who’d resisted. I was Grammie’s granddaughter but also Uncle Murdo’s great, great niece. And my presence at Standing Rock was another act of resistance and support.
 
But then I was asked to go back to Standing Rock on November 2nd and 3rd for a Clergy Call, this time by Father John Floberg, priest on Standing Rock. He prayed he’d get at least 100 people and over 525 came. Our purpose was to stand in solidarity as religious and spiritual leaders. But before we could stand in solidarity, Father Floberg knew that particularly the Christians needed to do some spiritual work. Before we marched, we were being asked to ceremonially repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery. 
 
For those of you not familiar with the Doctrine of Discovery, it was a series of pronouncements by the Pope starting in 1452 which stated that it was the right of any Christian who encountered a non-Christian to take their land and kill, enslave or otherwise dominate them. Many also call the Doctrine of Discovery the Doctrine of Christian Domination. It was first issued to encourage the Portugese to colonize West Africa and enslave folks. And it literally baptized the expedition of Christopher Columbus and subsequent explorers. And the Doctrine of Discovery was cited as early as 1823 by US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall and has been woven into US law—continuing to be cited in case law as recently as 2014. There is a lot more to say about the Doctrine of Discovery but I hope that gives you some idea if it is an unfamiliar term.
 
Given the genocidal impact of the Doctrine of Discovery, our Clergy Call needed to start with it. And so, on a cold November morning, we arrived at Oceti Sakowin and gathered around the sacred fire before a council of elders. (turn to slide #10) And then, one by one, leaders of the various Christian denominations who’d done work within their own traditions to repudiate the Doctrine—the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America were three—came forward and read the official statements of repudiation. And then they handed a ceremonial copy of the Doctrine of Discovery to the Standing Rock elders who then took coals from the sacred fire and burned it.
 
This ceremonial act acknowledged that given over 500 years of physical and cultural genocide, forced clearing from the land, boarding schools, and environmental degradation—all done in the name of Christian domination—we needed to begin with confession and repentance. And out of confession and repentance can come acts of repair. And perhaps, then, some kind of reconciliation might be possible.
 
Our being there as religious leaders was an act of solidarity—a small act of repair—but we needed to start with confession and repentance and the ceremonial repudiating of the Doctrine of Discovery was that.
 
And then we marched from the camp to the bridge on Highway 1806 just south of where the pipeline would go under the road and then under Lake Oahe. But by this time, the Morton County Sheriffs Department had become a militarized force and we were standing on the road in plain sight of armored vehicles with aircraft flying overhead on a regular basis. It was an eerie and palpable sign of the Doctrine of Christian Dominance.
 
I only had less than a week before I returned a third time to Oceti Sakowin as a guest of two Standing Rock tribal Council members. I knew I would be asked where I was coming from and this time this answer to who I was and what history lived in my body was even more complex.
 
I am the granddaughter of Mary Doyle MacKenzie Unwin whose people survived the Highland Clearances but resisted. But I am also a Christian pastor and heir to all that was done in my name and in the name of the Doctrine of Discovery. (As I was doing some research in preparation for being here, I was looking at photos of the massacre at Wounded Knee, which is often said marked the end of the US Indian Wars, and of the grave site there. And I was looking at photos of the grave site at Culloden Moor, where the Scottish uprising was put down for the last time.  It is eerie to see some of the similarities. But more painful for me was that twenty soldiers were given medals of honor for their killing spree done under the command of Col. James Forsythe. It was a Scotsman who led the massacre.)
 
Where are you coming from? I come from the survivors of the Highland Clearances, those who resisted. I come from those who survived the Highland Clearances and then came to this country or to Australia to turn around and perpetrate genocide on others. I come from a Christian tradition of a gospel of liberation—rooted in one whose whole ministry was to resist Roman Imperial occupation. I come from a Christian tradition that has been colonized by Empire and used to perpetrate unspeakable Holocaust and Slavery and pogrom and domination all over these lands.
 
What, then, am I supposed to do with all of this history that literally lives in my own body? And why do I share it with you?
 
You might recall that Rev. Marlene Whiterabbit Helgemo asked that we come to Standing Rock in the first place to be witnesses and interpreters but not to do so from a perspective of being a theological tourist. She has since asked that we go and “get our people” to tell the story.
 
This ask is a complicated one because it entails several layers of thinking and acting.
 
Because the Doctrine of Discovery and the Highland Clearances both live in me, my telling the story of Standing Rock has to be both the story of Empire Christianity and how Christian Domination is a distortion of the liberative story that is the core of Christianity.
 
(I haven’t even talked about my being queer and how a big piece of the rationale for Christian Domination was that indigenous understandings of sexuality and gender were more expansive than Empire Christianity’s and were a critical part of what the Doctrine of Discovery sought to crush.  As Pedro Font, an early Franciscan conquistador in the America’s wrote in his diaries:
 
Among the women I saw some men dressed like women, with whom they go about regularly, never joining the men… From this I inferred they must be hermaphrodites, but from what I learned later I understood that they were sodomites, dedicated to nefarious practices. From all the foregoing I conclude that in this matter of incontinence there will be much to do when the Holy Faith and the Christian religion are established among them.[1]
 
So, being a witness and interpreter of Standing Rock is also the story of being in solidarity in a way that is honest with the complexity of the power and vulnerability I hold in my own body. And for me, that is balancing being a follower—listening to the voices of indigenous leaders and doing what I’m asked to do—with being a leader in the context that it makes sense for me to lead.
 
The very good news is that although Oceti Sakowin and Oceti Oyate are no longer camps, the movement that has sprung from Standing Rock is only growing. 
 
As I close, I would ask you, where are you coming from when you do your justice work? Whose struggle do you hold in your body?
 
 
 
 
 


[1] Pedro Font, Font’s Complete Diary of the Second Anza Expedition, trans. and ed. Hubert Eugene Bolton, vol. 4 of Anza’s California Expeditions (Berkeley: University of California, 1930), 105, quoted in Katz, Gay American History, 291.