Page 16 - C.A.L.L. #40 - Winter 2015
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It was a raw, bright afternoon in their earth-centered rituals, and
April. Christian and Johannes, or to Johannes was sampling Hinduism.
be accurate (stay with me here)
Zephram and Johannes (Christian When you’re gay, Zephram pointed
changed his name again when he out, it is not always the case that
realized the hoped-for brotherhood traditional religions will welcome you.
was never going to materialize, and So alternatives beckon.
his new last name is de Colebi), are
now 65 and 64. And they have Salt Lake City was changing, they
reconfigured their life here for the said; they could see their future
third time in three decades. mapped out there, and it was not an
appealing one. “Successful urban
The 25 buildings that dot the gays, buying property, having
landscape are mostly dormant, save cultural weekends in San Francisco,”
for Zephram’s house and Johannes’s Johannes said. “Save us.”
house. The two have been living
separately, so to speak, for a Inspired in part by the Mormons,
decade, individual housing being an they began to turn over the idea of
unlooked-for boon when their starting an intentional community in
commune went to pieces and they a rural setting. But how to organize?
ceased to be a couple. What would be the guiding principle?
They toyed with creating a gay
They’ve sold most of their antique Scottish clan (Johannes is from
tools, save for a handful, which Texas and Zephram from Maine, and
they’ve added to the collection of both have Scottish forebears) or
furniture, housewares, paintings, starting their own version of the
textiles and other Pennsylvania Radical Faeries, a vaguely pagan,
Dutch relics they’ve amassed over spiritually based queer
the years. The two have turned the counterculture movement from the
whole lot — thousands of artifacts mid-1970s.
— into a museum, filling the
cavernous barn where they spent They moved to Bethlehem, Pa., that
their first winter with exhibits. hotbed of Moravian culture (crafts
and agriculture, mostly), where
Johannes and Zephram met in the Zephram worked as a teacher and
1970s at a gay-consciousness-raising Johannes as a reporter. There they
group in Salt Lake City, where both learned of a curious local offshoot
were attending college. They were of a brotherhood started in Europe
each dabbling in various spiritual in the 18th century.
practices: Zephram was circling
around the Wiccans, attracted by Its leader was the charismatic son
of a patron of the Moravian Church,
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