Drag Queen to Bodhisattva 

Street Zen: The Life & Works of Issan Dorsey by David Schneider.  Shambhala.  246 pp. *****

I resisted reading this book for a long time.  Back in the early nineties, when my wife was in divinity school and we began meditating, she worked one summer at an AIDS hospice in Boston and continued to work with the gay men who had organized it throughout her years at divinity school.  I knew those men and heard a number of heart-wrenching stories of men dying with AIDS.  The whole AIDS era was rife with such stories, and I supposed that at some point I wanted to move away from them, and from the whole subject.  As AIDS became an illness that people were able to survive, I didn’t want to go back to that time.

But I was wrong to resist this book, which tells a remarkable story.  Issan Dorsey does finally die a rather horrible death from AIDS (and I have to say, as I read that, that I wondered if all the treatment was worth it.  A lot of the suffering came from attempts to treat the disease and prolong his life).  But his story is remarkable not just from the way his life turned around completely, from being a drug addict, drag queen, and prostitute to being an incredibly compassionate and loving Zen priest, but the way those two parts of his life merged almost seamlessly.  I thought in fact that it was because he had gone so low in his early life that he was able to have such compassion later.  He could run an AIDS hospice and welcome any kind of person into it because he knew where they came from, and understood what drove them there.  He became a person who rejected no one.  And he did that because of the life he had lived.

Tommy—the name his friends called him from an early age—did not become a drag performer out of some desperate wish to make a living.  He was a performer first and a drag queen second, but he took great pride in his performances and—if the photos are any indication—was convincing as a female.  At first he had a few songs that he sang, later he just pantomimed recordings, but he still made a decent living and traveled around the country with other drag performers.

Dorsey didn’t seem to feel a lot of guilt about being gay or about who he was in general; he sometimes turned tricks as a prostitute because he could pick up spare cash that way, and he seemed to get into heavy drinking and drugs because of the travails of performing, staying up late, pushing himself.  His life only gradually became sordid and depraved, to the point where author David Schneider suggests that readers might want to skip to the next chapter to avoid the worst.  I personally was fascinated and kept on reading.

Of all the human vices, I understand intoxication the least.  When I encountered the life of Chogyam Trungpa, for instance, I completely understood his wanting to sleep with his students, but couldn’t understand why a man who had attained such clarity wanted to sit around drinking malt liquor (or saki) all the time.  I felt the same way about Dorsey.  I understood all the sexual hijinks, but why he wanted to take barbituates all day long, and mix them with marijuana, cocaine, heroin, that I couldn’t understand.  I like to drink beer, and like the buzz it gives me, but I stop way before the buzz goes to total oblivion.  I haven’t enjoyed the occasions when I went past the buzz.

Dorsey’s move from a life of what looked like total depravity to a religious life didn’t involve some major conversion.  He was living in San Francisco, batting around different places.  He started living with an old friend named Grant Dailey, who did take drugs, but also had a spiritual bent, having studied teachers like Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti.  Dorsey and his friends began taking psychedelics and finding a different kind of experience with those drugs.  They began as a household to do a kind of basic meditation along with the drug taking.  And then something led them to the San Francisco Zen Center, where a Japanese priest named Shunryu Suzuki sat zazen every morning at 5:30 and allowed anyone to show up who wanted to learn.  At first Dorsey and his cohorts stayed up all night to go to the sessions.  But gradually they changed the way they lived.

It’s amazing how easily and gracefully Dorsey adapted to this new way of life.  He had always been a person who was more in his body and less in his head than others; he’d been a poor student at school and didn’t like to study.  But he loved cleaning and keeping things neat, and was happy to move into a new situation where that was part of the life (Suzuki Roshi was big on cleaning).  There is plenty to study in Zen if you want that, but the basic practice is the physical act of sitting.  And he’d always lived in groups of like-minded people.  He adapted to the Zen Center, to Tassajara Mountain Center, and to Green Gulch Farm.  People loved him at all three places.

Dorsey had a special bond with Suzuki Roshi, who loved him as everyone else did, but after Suzuki died, Dorsey became close to his successor, Richard Baker, who was a completely different kind of person—a Harvard trained intellectual, for one thing—but who also appreciated the qualities that Dorsey brought to practice and valued him as a student.  When a scandal erupted over Baker’s sexual indiscretions, Dorsey never wavered in seeing the man as his teacher, and for a time he followed him to Santa Fe after Baker had left San Francisco in disgrace.

I’ve heard and read a lot about Richard Baker, including a whole book about the scandal at SFZC (Shoes Outside the Door by Michael Downing), and this is the first time that he came across as a sympathetic character.  Schneider’s account of the whole scandal gave me pause.  It is true that he had sex with one of his students, a woman who was the wife of his best friend (?).  This student, of course, was a mature human being who was making her own choices.  Baker had come up in the Sixties, when a fair amount of sexual experimentation went on; he’d apparently been involved with students before, but he’d told his wife beforehand and also told her about this situation.

He and this woman, according to Baker, were madly in love.  It’s true that he hadn’t informed the woman’s husband, who claimed to be on the verge of suicide when he heard.  And there were other charges against Baker, including the fact that he’d been neglecting his duties as a teacher and hobnobbing with California notables like Jerry Brown and Stewart Brand, ostensibly to raise money but also just to hobnob (Dorsey largely ran the center in his absence).  The Zen Center was occupied with a variety of commercial enterprises, and some students were so over-committed to work that they weren’t practicing.  All this was a far cry from the days when Suzuki Roshi greeted everybody personally as they left the zendo.

But I also had the feeling that the real problem was that these two people had fallen in love and had sex, which—I hate to say it—is something that happens in life.  You can argue that Baker should have acted differently and that his life had gotten out of balance, but I don’t know that he should have been ridden out of town on a rail.  The things that board members said about him were rather harsh (“Richard Baker is a venomous snake” ??).  The man saw the error of his ways and wanted to repent and continue at the Zen Center, but they wouldn’t let him.

Dorsey, to say the least, had an open mind about sexual behavior and was exemplary throughout the whole situation.  When asked about it, he just said that Baker was his teacher and left it at that, a fact which he was committed to.  He himself was on the board, and he and another man voted against what the other people said; there were a lot of 10-2 votes that year.  Dorsey briefly moved to Santa Fe with Baker.  (Poet Philip Whalen, another man with a broad view of things, also moved, and stayed much longer than Dorsey.)  Eventually Dorsey returned to San Francisco, took up his old life at the Center, and moved on to organize the Hartford Street Zen Center, which had become a place for gay men to practice.  He eventually established it as a Zen hospice (again, to the objection of many around him) and did that work in an exemplary way, until his own sad death.   But he truly acted as a Bodhisattva in his final years, and we began to see that he’d been living that way all his life.  He had flaws like everyone else, and he certainly led a wild life, but he loved people and accepted them unconditionally.  Christians would have called him a saint.

Schneider tells this story beautifully, relying on interviews with many of Dorsey’s friends and also on his personal friendship with a man he thought of as his best friend.  I actually most enjoyed the passages toward the end when Schneider quoted from his own journal and gave us an inside glimpse of the man that the interviews didn’t reveal.  Dorsey had an odd path to becoming a priest, but his life is all of a piece.  It makes for fascinating reading.