Philadelphia's Pit Bull Problem

From PJ Media by Thom Nickels

On second thought, I don’t want to know because the reality is, they are not dogs. They are something else. They are pit bulls.

Philadelphia is pit bull heaven, although it used to be that only the grungiest people owned them, like drug dealers, the corner tough guy or people who just didn’t know any better. Pit bulls were associated with crime and filth and people with little or no class. Then there was a transformation. The pit bull’s inherent ugliness (all jaw) was suddenly perceived as something beautiful. This reversal game reminds me very much of George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth in the novel1984 standing for its opposite, the Ministry of Lies.

I have a neighbor who has three ferocious pit bulls. These dogs are not gentle. They growl in his backyard. They chew and eat everything. One time they ate through a wire fence.  When this neighbor of mine walks his pits, three at a time, they storm the street ahead of him, growling, snarling and racing as if possessed by demons.

I don’t know how my neighbor deals with these animals. The pits are so uncontrollable he has to walk them very late at night. If he walked them too early in the day they would lunge at people passing by on the sidewalk. These pits will attack anyone and everyone. At night sometimes I hear them growling and chewing through rubber and wire.  When I am on my patio I hear them in my neighbor’s house growling and clamoring to get out so they can attack me.

These pits sometimes appear in my nightmares: Twenty charging pit bulls in a pack howling like wolves in Germany’s Black Forest. There’s nowhere to escape. In these dreams I see people running into their houses.

The pits are coming. The pits are coming.

What happened to the wonderful Collies of yesterday?

As an animal lover, I have a hard time with pit bulls. I like my dogs to be graceful and sleek not barrel-shaped with bulbous round heads and eyes that are always defensively on edge, like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s eyes. I like a dog’s face not to be all jaw. The all-jaw look is a giveaway: this animal is aout violence and death.

A friend of mine insists that the odd disappearance of feral cats in the neighborhood has something to do with the popularity of pit bulls.

City feral cats slip in and out of my backyard patio and then they walk into my neighbor’s patio. Before he was forced to keep his pit bulls indoors because of all the damage they were causing, they roamed the patio and attacked and devoured feral cats. It was much like the fly going into the spider’s web.

“It’s not the breed it’s the people who raise the dogs,” pit bull enthusiasts say. “Remember this the next time you read an awful story about a pit attacking a toddler on the way home from school. It’s the fault of the owners, the people who trained the pit, not the pit.” In other words, it’s comparable to a teen boy who bullies people. Blame the parents. The kid wasn’t trained properly. He’s innocent.

Pit bull lovers are like people who belong to religious cults. They have lost the ability to reason and think rationally. The pit bull to them is a golden calf, an idol that must be protected at all costs.

On the Pennsylvania SPCA website, most of the dogs up for adoption are pit bulls with names like Machiatto and Brown Sugar. The underlying philosophy of the SPCA is that pit bulls are beautiful and loyal pets and they are just like any other dog—the regal Greyhound, the cute as pie Chihuahua, the hot dog or Dachshund or the supremely benevolent Collie. The SPCA has become part of the pit bull propaganda machine when they spout mantras like: Don’t blame the pit bull if it turns violent, blame the awful person who taught the pit how to be an indiscriminate fighter or growler.

Yet we never read how five Collie’s mauled a Philadelphia toddler to death, as was the case in August 2018 when Newsweek reported that five pit bulls killed a toddler.

In January of 2019, Philadelphia police shot pit bulls attacking a woman in her Northeast neighborhood. These same pit bulls had attacked the woman on a previous occasion.

Like the Pennsylvania SPCA, ACCT Philly, the largest animal care and control service provider in the region, hosts countless pictures of dogs up for adoption. Ninety percent of the dogs are pit bulls with names like Bahama Mama, Dobby, Star, Chase, Marathon, Harper and Chance. The name Chance is appropriate. You take a chancea with a pit bull. Many pit bull attacks occur after the dogs have been relatively well behaved for long periods of time. Then something snaps. That something is called the breed; it’s called genetics.

Pit bulls are not "mean" or “aggressive” when they maim and kill any more than labs are mean or aggressive when they retrieve; pit bulls simply maul and kill because of genetics. Denying the truth won't reduce the killings by these intentionally bred blood sport animals.

There is only one solution: Spay and neuter pit bulls to extinction.

The propaganda campaign currently underway to get the public to believe that pit bulls are either beautiful or “just like any dog” has the same fanatical feel to it as the brainwashing engineered to get people to believe that gender is not God-given but something that can be chosen. The pit bull propaganda machine might also be compared to the “Islam is just like any other religion” campaign.

The breeding of pit bull traits into the larger classic dog population has essentially destroyed the dog world. Dogs with half pit bull traits are now as common as the Cocker Spaniel was only forty years ago.

Pit bulls were practically unheard of when I was growing up. There were only Collies, Dachshunds, (real) Boxers and Shepherds, although the term junkyard dog (breed unknown) made the rounds from time to time, referring to ill-mannered ugly dogs who were so nasty they would attack their own tail.

Perhaps the most infamous dog in my family was the black French Poodle, Monsieur Faux Pas.

Monsieur Faux Pas was an indiscriminate, shameless cad. He loved legs, all sorts of legs, young and old, even leggy furniture stumps. As a teenager, I would walk Monsieur Faux Pas all over the streets of West Chester, Pennsylvania. He was well behaved during these walks but he showed his Jekyll and Hyde side at family gatherings as the adults sipped cocktails in the living room.

That’s when he would go on a leg romp. There’s nothing in life that brings one down to earth faster than having a dog greet you with a leg hump.  My venerable grandfather, dressed to the nines, would suddenly be jolted forward on the sofa as Monsieur wrapped his beastly paws around his argyle socks.

“No, no, no!” grandmother would interject

Monsieur, undeterred, would proceed to Aunt Dora—silk stockings always made the grade—then proceed to grandmother herself, and then after that to each of my siblings, going down the line.

“He needs to be locked in a room,” Aunt Dora would say, and so Monsieur would be ushered upstairs until the terrible spell that had possessed him had passed. In an hour or so he could be released into polite company.

But had Monsieur been a pit bull he would have eaten his way out of that room and then punished us all with certain death.

Oscar Visits Walt

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Jun 19, 2019

 Philadelphia Free Press

The last big Whitman at 200 event was Tom Wilson Weinberg’s Oscar Visits Walt, a musical play about the time when Oscar Wilde, then 27 and on a United States tour, visited 62 year old Walt Whitman at the Whitman family home in Camden Stevens’ Street.

The event was held at Philly AIDS Thrift @ Giovanni’s Room on a dark and stormy night. About 15 people, most of them press, crammed into the tiny store, some straddling the famous narrow staircase as Andrew Borjask, dressed as Whitman in a fine leather ‘western’ hat, lingered by the door of the store waiting for Oscar to knock.

Tom Wilson Weinberg, dressed in appropriate theater black sans a string of old pearls he said his mother bequeathed to him (rather than to his two brothers) was his gracious self as his partner of many years, John Whyte, a physician by profession, held copies of the script in order to prompt the actors should they forget a line or two. (As it turned out, there were not many corrections but when they did occur they seemed to add a bounce to the play).

It didn’t take long for me to see why Weinberg cast Borjask as Walt. With his bright, steady eyes and confident countenance, Borjask was the perfect Whitman. The more verbose in love with himself 27 year old Oscar was the more conversationally fluid of the two characters. Caleb J. Tracy, as Oscar, fit Whitman’s historic description of Wilde as a “big, splendid boy.” Tracy had Wilde’s mannerisms down pat, his aesthete poses by the mantelpiece, the way he presented Walt with a lily, the elegant hand and foot gestures. And then there was Oscar’s walking stick, a cane topped with a bright white duck’s head. It was enough to make me want to read up on Wilde the next day. In real life Whitman was anything but a conversationalist. He spoke in short, ungrammatical bursts. Wilde was a snob. Weinberg’s Walt is polished and grammatical.

“… Wilde didn’t travel to Camden to talk about gender roles or belles letters,” The New Republic reported in 2014. “The writer was still years away from becoming the author whose peerlessly witty plays are still staged today. What drew him to Whitman’s home was the opportunity to discuss fame. He wanted to listen to the singer of “Song of Myself”—an older man with inexhaustible energy, despite his infirmity, for self-promotion. “

When Wilde was a student at Oxford he may have been an aesthete with an obsessive penchant for decorating his rooms, but he was no slouch when it came to defending himself. Once when hewas bullied by two or three thuggish classmates he sprung into action, throwing one bully on the floor and the other one against the wall. This lily was loaded with dynamite.

In Oscar Visits Walt, Wilde tells Walt that he is not attracted to him in a husband like way. Like most twenty-something men (especially in the gay world), age consciousness is always a front and center issue. Generally it is always younger people who are the first to point out age differences when in mixed company. Oscar, of course, is jumping the gun here because at this point Walt hasn’t really made a pass at him. Oscar is just protecting himself, setting limits “just in case” ole Walt gets some funny ideas.

Ironically, Oscar certainly doesn’t fit Walt’s ideal of the sexy man-boy. None of Walt’s male comrades in Camden and elsewhere were as flamboyant, elegantly verbose and as ‘lily limping’ as Oscar was. They were working class man-boys, uneducated, blue collar ruffians that in many ways might be compared to the opioid driven knapsack-carrying vagabonds with dirty hands that one sees on the streets of Philadelphia today. Most of them were almost certainly heterosexual.

Yet it is fascinating to see how Weinberg draws out these two men, who are not really each other’s “type,” and then make it believable that they irresistibly drawn to one another so that a quick rendezvous in Walt’s bedroom is a cosmic “must do.”

Of course, for the “dirt” on what Walt liked to do in bed all you have to do is read Edward Carpenter’s writing on the subject. Carpenter spells out the details clearly. In some descriptions of what Walt liked to do the reader is told that Walt behaved in an authentically loving manner rather than in a feverish succumbus fashion. American poet Allen Ginsberg, who claimed to be Walt Whitman’s poetic successor, was saddled with the latter charge.

The two men emerge from Walt’s bedroom, Oscar first, then Walt, both of them tucking in or rearranging their shirts. Oscar has less to rearrange which to me indicated that Weinberg did his Carpenter homework.

Sex may have happened between the two men or it may not have. We will never know. Weinberg’s play is exceedingly clever and has its brilliant moments; the musical lyrics—many of which come straight from Whitman and Wilde while others come from Weinberg—delight the ear, however when Oscar repeatedly digs at Walt for his attitudes towards black Americans the work enters preachy, ideological waters. One reference to this would have been sufficient; sometimes less is more.

Oscar Wilde was a truly great man whose life and work speaks to many issues—some controversial-- current today.

In 2011, The Guardian reported, “A kiss may ruin a human life,” Oscar Wilde once wrote. It can also ruin the stonework of a tomb, judging by the extraordinary graffiti – kisses in lipstick left by admirers – that for years have been defacing and even eroding the massive memorial to the Irish dramatist and wit in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery.

In the 1990s women in fresh red lipstick began the cult practice of kissing Wilde’s tomb or writing messages on the tomb with lipstick. This caused the stone to be damaged. Eventually a glass barrier was erected around the tomb to protect Wilde from his fans.

In 2015, The New York Times Arts Beat reported that:

“Efforts to stage a gay-themed play about Oscar Wilde in Moscow foundered in June on the Russian government’s hostility toward homosexuality and the use of foreign funds for artistic productions. Now, the New York-based theater company that was partnering in that project will hold a one-night-only, impressively cast benefit reading of the play in October in Manhattan to focus attention on what it calls Russia’s suppression of the rights of gays and lesbians.’

The topic of Oscar Wilde is also big on Catholic lecture circuits. This is due in part to Wilde’s deathbed conversion to Catholicism. Joseph Pearce, author of The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, writes:

I’m very much influenced, or motivated, by the provocations of errors in recent biographies of Wilde. Ellmann’s biography, Oscar Wilde [Penguin, 1988] was considered, blithely, the definite biography of Wilde. Part of that is Ellmann’s academic reputation; also Oscar Wilde is large and substantial. Lots of research has gone into it. But Ellmann gets all the facts and then mixes them up in such a way as to not clarity, but to muddy the waters. His is a postmodern biography. Wilde is presented as a relativist with no sense of good and evil. On the contrary, Wilde’s art shows a consistency of objective morality, specifically Christian morality”

In The Long Conversion of Oscar Wilde, Andrew McCracken writes:

“As Wilde lay dying on his bed in Paris, Robbie Ross called in a priest, an English Passionist, Father Dunne. Wilde was given conditional Baptism and was anointed. For a short time he emerged from delirium into lucidity, and Father Dunne, examining him, was satisfied that Wilde freely desired reception into the Church. Wilde died a Catholic on November 30.

The poet’s great antagonist, the Marquis of Queensberry, died in the same year. On his deathbed, he too was received into the Catholic Church. And the object of the poet’s self-destructive passion, Lord Alfred Douglas, became a Catholic in 1911 and remained firm in the Faith until his death, though his later writings betray a conservatism that is distasteful and uncharitable.

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Road Trip to Connecticut

Wed, May 01, 2019

Philadelphia Free Press

Connecticut’s famous Gold Coast Merritt Parkway is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. ‘The Merritt’ is considered to be one of the most beautiful roads in the United States. Its unique overpass bridges are architectural marvels; each bridge is different with its own elaborate designs. The surrounding woods and rock formations are a delight to the eye.


So why wouldn’t any car trip on ‘The Merritt’ be absolute heaven? Why would a trip I took recently be sheer hell?

It was sheer hell because of the number of people traveling out of New York City (from the George Washington Bridge) into Connecticut to visit family and friends for the Passover and Easter holiday. Too many people, as in bumper-to-bumper traffic, stalled traffic that didn’t move for fifteen minutes, or when it did move, it moved at a snail’s pace for miles. Thirty minutes would pass, an hour, then another hour and still the three of us—two biological sisters who are friends of mine-- were still stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, a good 25 miles from our destination, the City of Ansonia.

Ordinarily the trip from Philadelphia to Ansonia by car can be done in 3 hours time but we were going on five hours with no end in sight.

“There are just too many people in the world,” I said. “Or too many people congregated in the same place.”

The Merritt Parkway’s beauty is marred only by its monochrome sameness: because the beautiful postcard landscape never changes the impression you get while traveling on the Parkway, even in low traffic, is that the car you are in hasn’t moved at all.

When we did finally arrive in Ansonia, we stumbled out of the car in a sort of traffic daze, legs cramped up, muscles aching, promising one another that we would never again travel anywhere near NYC on Passover and Easter. “Hell is other people,” the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once wrote, and ‘The Merritt’ was ample proof of that.

We slept like euthanized dogs that first night. I dreamt of traffic scene backups and car accidents one sees in old Jean Luc Godard films. “It’s best that we don’t even see the inside of a car today,” I blurted out the next morning over a home cooked breakfast of bacon and eggs. But, of course, that was not to be. We were back in the car in no time but this time at least we would just be traveling between Ansonia and its sister city, Derby near the Naugatuck River. Little civilized car excursions with no traffic pile-ups do not a stressful day makes. In fact, that first day in Ansonia was quite beautiful.

My friends kept talking about cashing in bottles and then taking a walk in Pine Grove cemetery near their home on Church Street. “What are the bottles?” I asked, thinking of the homeless scrappers along Aramingo Avenue in Olde Richmond. I soon found out when we drove to the bottle-recycling machine that pays 5 cents for every glass bottle, plastic and aluminum can. If Philadelphia had a system like the streets here would be as clean as they are in Connecticut

Ansonia was settled by English colonists in 1652 but incorporated as a city in 1893. Many early immigrants were Ukrainian Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, hence the high number of three bar crosses on the tombstones in Pine Grove cemetery. While inspecting the graves, I took note of the various styles of tombstones and decided I didn’t like the current tombstone fashion trend of slick black marble cut in strange curly cue styles. Many WWII veterans are buried here; most seemed to have died in the 1980s. Our sightseeing was interrupted when we noticed a couple of teenagers walking through the cemetery but they were mild mannered teens not the inviting trouble sort. (Remember, hell is other people).

G, who braved the traffic when she drove her sister and me to Ansonia the previous day, recalled walking into a cemetery at night as a girl with a friend and spotting an open crypt that had been violated by vandals who had also managed to dislodge and open a casket. “We left the cemetery screaming,” she said. But there was no screaming in this quaint Ansonia cemetery.

That evening as we were comfortably watching the Turner Classic Movie channel a friend called me from Philadelphia and asked if I had heard the latest news. He told me that the Flyers—that hockey team which used to appeal only to white people with certain low class tendencies—were upset that Kate Smith had once sung and recorded songs that are currently perceived as “racist.” My friend, who knows everything about old records and cylinders—he can rattle off endless lists of race-sensitive songs so popular at the turn of the 20th Century-- reminded me that Smith only recorded what her bosses at Columbia Records told her to record. He also said that Paul Robeson also recorded some of the songs Kate was being criticized for recording.

“The Flyers want to tear her statue down,” he said. The news hit hard even though years ago it wasn’t uncommon for me to criticize Kate Smith in print for singing “God Bless America” when it seemed that America didn’t deserve to be blessed. But tear down her statue outside the Flyers arena was just another win for the fanatical PC crowd that is doing its best to turn the United States into what Europe is now, a landscape where one can be arrested for thinking outside the box, for using the wrong pronouns or for uttering the “wrong” words in public.

“Kate did a lot for civil rights,” my friend said, and he proceeded to list a number of things she did, including bringing Josephine Baker back to the United States and giving her air time on her show, “The Kate Smith Hour.”

First, it was the Rizzo state, now it’s Kate Smith, so who’s next? Somebody is next that much is certain. As a Daily News columnist noted, it could be Ben Franklin, William Penn or even, as I’d like to suggest, Walt Whitman for something that he might have said, written or thought in the past that some witch hunter will discover in the future which will necessitate removing his name from the bridge across the Delaware.

What bothered me most about my friend’s report was that there was no indication that there were protests forming in Philadelphia against removing Kate’s statue. No news of protests, no sit-ins, nobody chaining him or herself to the statue in the name of free speech. Oh , would be Op Ed pieces and enraged letters to the editor decrying the PC culture and the loss of free speech. There would also be a lot of hand wringing and comments like “Isn’t it awful!” but beyond that, nothing. The statue would be removed and that would be that. The Flyers would go on without suffering any sort of karmic “Payback,” (a slap from God) for their insult to a great American icon.

The Flyers will get away with it, just as those ideologue Che Guevara Toys R Us revolutionaries got away with removing the Rizzo statue.

I didn’t mention the Kate Smith fiasco to my friends the next day although I kept hoping that somebody, a group of fans, lovers of free speech, would rally around preserving her statue and that the course of things would be reversed, saved by public outcry.

When a friend of my two friends arrived in Ansonia for Easter dinner, I was charged with keeping him company while my two friends prepared the spread and arranged the table. The new guest, I had been informed, had recently come out of the closet after being married with children. He was a pleasant guy who liked to hold court although his tendency was to monopolize conversations. He wasn’t in the house ten minutes before he started talking about Donald Trump, at which point one of my friends in the kitchen said, “Please, no politics here.”

He was also what I call a full checklist LGBTQ kind of guy, the kind of guy whose opinions all match the position papers of LGBTQ organizations. He talked about his work with the ACLU, marriage equality and a plethora of civil rights issues and then started to throw around the words, “white privilege” (he was white). Other PC buzzwords rained down like confetti until I told him what the Philadelphia Flyers were doing to Kate Smith, and how they wanted to chop her statue off its pedestal and wrap it in a black shroud and then cart it off to who- knows- where in the name of political correctness.

To my delight and amazement, he said that such tactics were excessive and unnecessary and that he didn’t agree with what the Flyers were doing at all.

Here was a politically correct poster guy admitting that at a certain point the extreme Left is just as bad as the extreme Right and that both ends have to be monitored because both can be equally dangerous.

Here, I thought, was a Lefty still capable of independent thought.

We had a great dinner after that.

By Thom Nickels• Wed, Apr 17, 2019

Philadelphia Free Press

Philadelphia in the 1980s and 1990s was a hotbed of New Age philosophers and do-it-yourself Swamis. Popular then was the magazine called New Frontier which covered the waterfront when it came to New Age esoterica. This was well before the alternative press reading public adopted atheistic humanism as their intellectual badge of honor. In New Frontier one could find about reincarnation and Edgar Cayce, the healing power of crystals and holistic foods, the power of Reiki, ads for visiting yogis or Indian godwomen (they usually made appearances at the Unitarian church at 21st and Chestnut Street), and so on. 

The editor and founder of New Frontier was Swami Nostradamus Virato, formerly Joseph Bacanskas (some bios list his last name as Banks) but also known as Slimy Tomato. Born into a Lithuanian family in Brooklyn in 1938, he was a smart kid with an introspective and scholastic bent. He first realized that he was able to tap into mystical realms at the age of nine while praying in a Catholic church in Brooklyn. At that time he said that he saw Jesus Christ come to him in “spiritual physical form.”

After completing college the future Swami entered the corporate world, married, and had three children. His biography states that he was even a member of the local Junior Chamber of Commerce. This is all solid citizen stuff; it certainly has the makings of a future City Council person. But then something happened. Banks walked out on his family in 1972 and adopted the life of a cosmic drifter. In 1976 he recalls how he was struck by “two flashes of light from above” while walking in New York City. The experience, he says, allowed him to enter into a “fulfilled state of consciousness” where his intuitive abilities and his attitudes towards life changed. The experience caused him to leave the corporate world in 1979, after which he traveled to India where he studied meditation and eastern philosophy. A year later he was initiated by the famous guru Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) and accepted the new name of Virato.

The name Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was also making the rounds in the city at that time. One could go into the homes of astrologers and tarot readers and see his books displayed on coffee tables. Many people were also chanting

Nam Myoho Renge Kyo at Buddhist centers around town. For a while I tried this myself, practicing the chant at home and then going to meetings but in the end gave it up because, as the French poet Arthur Rimbaud once noted, we are all a slave to our baptism.

Osho’s Ten Commandments can be summed up at follows:

Never obey anyone’s command unless it is coming from within you also.

There is no God other than life itself.

Truth is within you, do not search for it elsewhere.

Love is prayer.

To become nothingness is the door to truth. Nothingness itself is the means, the goal and attainment.

Life is now and here.

Live wakefully.

Do not swim—float.

Die each moment so that you can be new each moment.

Do not search. That which is, is. Stop and see.

Osho’s biggest teaching tenet was Tantric Sex but he also emphasized meditation, mindfulness, love, celebration and humor. In his Tantric sex workshops around the world his followers engaged in psychotherapeutic orgies where everything was allowed. Incidences of brutality, rape and death sometimes marred these Lee Strasberg-like method acting sessions although when a devotee died (in a workshop) their body was quickly cremated to get rid of the evidence. Osho was famous for his luxury cars and lush lifestyle and he often said that if he couldn’t supply the world or his followers with luxury he could at least make himself happy with luxury. In 1984, Osho predicted that three quarters of the world would die from AIDS and advised his followers to wear latex gloves and condoms when having sex but to refrain from kissing. Osho did not subsist on meditation and sex alone but was known to have taken 60 milligrams of valium a day; he was also addicted to nitrous oxide.

Virato was also involved in EST and Lifespring, major consciousness raising movements of that era that demanded large sums of money upfront. Although not specifically categorized as religions, EST and Lifespring adherents often did covert missionary work in the city, even going into gay bars and posing as gay men so that they could make “dates” with people they thought would make good followers. When it came time for the “date” in question, the man who was asked out would not be driven to a bar or restaurant, and then to a lover’s land somewhere in Fairmont Park, but to a Lifespring meeting. This was also a common practice among some evangelical, fundamentalist Christians at the time. Attractive male “born agains” would allow gay men to approach them, make a date for sometime in the future and then on the day of the date the fundamentalist guy would show up, Bible in hand, and begin to lecture.

Virato liked to say that there was “no Tantra school,” that Tantra was just a matter of waking up and learning the art of letting go. He once told an interviewer that one could be falling from a tall building and heading past the 32nd floor and if he/she let go in the Tantra fashion it would be a wonderful experience. Tantra could also be eating plant based foods and its meditation techniques, he claimed, could cure addictions to food, alcohol and heroin. He was against the wearing of colognes or perfumes and was fond of expressing his delight about something but saying, “It was really trippy.” He did a lot of work in Russia where he met and married a much younger slender long haired girl named

He often said that there were four kinds of Tantra. White Tantra was the Sikh traditional; yellow tantra was Tibetan or Buddhist tantra; black tantra was the worship of death, sado-masochism and voodoo and red tantra was the tantra of sensuality, of taste and smell. Vitro said that he was a red tantra fellow, adding “Most of the work I did was very sexually oriented for thirty years.”

“Tantra doesn’t tell you to control your sexual urges to reach God,” Virato wrote, “but rather the opposite. It supports the development of this vital energy to achieve union with Divinity. The essence of Tantra is the full expression of existence... a merging with, rather than a withdrawing from. It is the ultimate yoga which is Sanskrit for union…”

“What about God?” Virato asks in one online video. “I do not believe in God! All beliefs for me are mechanisms by which people are controlled unconsciously or are self controlled because they are mentally dysfunctional.” Then he adds: “How does one believe in the sun? How does one believe in a little puppy dog or a flower? There’s nothing to believe. Belief is the blasphemy of truth.”

Virato lived on South Street before his departure to Ashville, North Carolina in 1994. His work at that time included the management of a holistic detoxification and meditation retreat 20 miles outside of Asheville. He felt that Philadelphia was overly crowded and that the region in general was falling victim to dangerous “sprawl.” While he seemed to find some peace and comfort in Asheville, he once complained that he had a car stolen one block away from the public access television station where he worked as a producer. He was afraid that Asheville, now that it had been discovered as a rustic mountain sophisticated hide-away, would in time be ruined by its own popularity. In 2007 he complained that “you can’t even walk the streets of Philadelphia or New York City.” He hated crack smokers and was not a fan of smoking marijuana in the street, so he probably wouldn’t be happy with today’s Philadelphia where you can’t go anywhere without smelling the bran cell destroying odor of the death plant.

“I’m not necessarily in favor of the Iraqi war,” he said in 2007, “but I’d like to see some wars in some of the United States of America, like New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Detroit, because everything is about money now.”

“We should continue to support AIDS,” he told said in 2007, “not AIDS research but support getting AIDS [as a method of population control].”

Virato died on February 2, 2013 in a hospice in Asheville with his wife Dhiraja Luda by his side. In one photograph he is shown lying in repose with a feather in his hand, a happy expression on his face. In one online obituary there were comments both pro and con about his life and legacy.

“Virato was the first person to open my eyes about tantra back in philly in the 70’s,” one woman wrote. “I loved the new frontier magazine.. he was a bit fake with his approach to tantra and women including me..just wanted to seduce whatever he could and pretend to show what tantra really was. But I am grateful that he opened my eyes to it… it was actually the beginning of my path…”

By Thom Nickels• Wed, May 08, 2019

    Philadelphia Free Press

A number of Indian holy men and women have visited Philadelphia for extended stays while touring various U.S. cities. One noted Avatar with a devoted following, Amma Sri Karunamayr, has been called the “embodiment of divinity” or the “incarnation of the divine” despite her insistence that she doesn’t see herself as separate from the rest of humanity. Born in 1958 in South India, as a young girl Amma loved to hear Sanskrit prayers. At 21 years of age in 1980 after reducing her intake of food, she traveled on foot to the Penusila Forest where Indians sages have gone to meditate for centuries. She spent years in the mountains, meditating, bathing in streams and eating wild herbs.”

When Amma left the mountains, she realized it was time to spring into action to help relieve suffering in the world. Contemplation and meditation without action is a useless endeavor, she teaches. Her message is generic and straightforward: One must be compassionate, merciful, and kind and be attentive to the plight of the poor.

Amma insists that she is not the head of a new religion and that anyone can come to her for blessings or guidance without giving up their spiritual traditions. The tenets of Hinduism teach that all religions are one and equal.

When Amma visited the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia at 2125 Chestnut Street sometime in the late 1990s her devotees were out in force.

Only in a Unitarian Church, or perhaps a Friends Meeting House, could you expect to find the carpet rolled out for a Hindu Avatar. Unitarian Universalists take great pride in describing themselves as unconventional Christians. Belief in the divinity of Christ for the average Unitarian is an option rather than a point of dogma. One can even be an atheist and be a Unitarian in good standing.

Noted for its extensive educational, cultural and civic activities, the Church at 21st and Chestnut has always been on the cutting edge of social justice programs. Founded in 1796 as the First Unitarian Society of Philadelphia, the present building was designed by Frank Furness for his father, Rev. Dr. William Furness. Martin Luther King, Jr. visited the church while a seminary student in Chester, Pennsylvania and it is said that actor Kevin Bacon, a Church member, had his acting debut there during a Christmas pageant. The Church has served as a meeting space for the Americans for Democratic Action, the Islamic Relief Day of Dignity, and aerobics and meditation classes.

It’s no wonder that Amma found her way to the church for a massive gathering of her Philadelphia devotees.

On the day that Amma visited 2125 Chestnut Street, I walked to the venue from my nearby Pine Street apartment, eager to discover for myself what the woman was all about. I had read that she could heal people from various ailments and that when she blessed you with sacred oil you came away changed in some way. I wanted to know if I would feel anything when Amma touched me, any tingling in my spine or any electrical impulses in my fingertips. I was also curious to see if Amma would say anything to me when it was my turn to receive her blessing. Her followers called her a “divine mother,” a rather ambiguous phrase that can be interrupted in a number of ways. Certainly, as a Christian, I could not entertain the thought that she was a replacement or a cosmic antecedent of the Virgin Mary. At most, I suspected that Amma had clairvoyant insight and “powers” comparable to the old Italian women psychics that used to populate the Italian Market area. When those old women put your hand in theirs, it was not unusual to feel a minor electrical shock as if something was running through your body. These old women taught me that clairvoyance and paranormal powers were real despite condemnations from professional skeptic-entertainers like James Randi.

As I entered the First Unitarian Church amid hundreds of Amma’s followers, the scent of flowers was overwhelming. The atmosphere was much like that in a Catholic or Orthodox Church at the visitation of some miraculous icon or reliquary. The sense of devotion I saw among Amma’s followers was startling.

Amma was seated in front of the Church in a throne like chair surrounded by garlands of flowers and attendants. It was a scene out of a movie by Cecil B. DeMille: a living, exotic goddess being venerated by hundreds. I agonized about whether I should go up and receive her blessing. Would that be some terrible, sacrilegious act? After all, Hinduism, according to classic Christian theology, was paganism in the extreme.

While deciding what I should do, I spotted someone I used to work with in the Curtis Building. “C” had been an avid professional and a very conscientious worker. She was also health conscious in the extreme and a fountain of information when it came to the best organic foods and drinkable spring water. A self described germophobe, I used to get a kick out of watching her scrubbing down her phone and head set at the calling center where we worked.

One day ‘C’ informed me that her mother was a great devotee of Padre Pio, the Catholic Franciscan saint who received the stigmata of Christ as a young monk in 1918. Padre Pio, who died in 1968, was famous the world over for his paranormal abilities. He was an adept at bi-location, levitation, and seeing the future. People who went to Padre Pio for confession were told of their sins before they opened their mouths, others were healed of terminal cancer, hearing loss, severe bone injuries and more.

After ‘C’ told me that she grew up in a household devoted to Padre Pio, I began to associate her with the saint. In my mind, I began calling her “Padre Pio’s blonde lady, the good worker.” Yet here she was at First Unitarian in full Amma mode, meaning that she was an official of sorts, one of the organizers perhaps. I watched her rush about talking to other organizers as everyone made ready for Amma’s receiving line to start moving.

I approached ‘C,’ reminding myself that I should not mention Padre Pio. That would be an acknowledgement of her past and what she had possibly left behind. Instead I greeted her with, “I’m surprised to see you here, but I read about this woman that I had to come.” ‘C’ smiled briefly and uttered something officious, saying the name Amma with special emphasis, as I had called her “this woman.” In that moment, I had to wonder if ‘C’ was keeping her new spiritual allegiance a secret given the devotional aspects of her Italian Christian family.

As I stood in line to receive Amma’s blessing—an anointing of oil plus the gift of a scented card with a picture of Amma on it--I noticed that ‘C’ was paying homage to Amma with the reverence of a cloistered nun kneeling in a great cathedral. I barely knew anything about Amma except the most banal superficialities and yet here I was about to face her and say a few words to her, but what those few words would be I had no idea. I did entertain the thought of asking Amma about Padre Pio but instead I asked her to bless the book I was working on. I was desperate for blessings in those days; I also entertained the thought that you never know who has the power.

The years passed and I kept the Amma’s card in old books. Often when I would pick up one of these old books the card would fall out and then I’d put it in another book, whereupon it would fall out later, and so on until the card had traveled the vast distance of my library. Sometimes I’d look at the card when it reappeared and put it to my nose to see if it had retained the scent of flowers but it was always as unscented as an old baseball card from childhood. I thought many times of throwing the card away but I somehow always managed to keep it. Whenever the card crossed my path, I would sometimes think of ‘C’ and wonder if she ever found her way back to Padre Pio.

The card emerged again right before I had resolved to write about Amma at the First Unitarian Church. When I spotted it, I went out of my way to put it in a special place so I wouldn’t lose it when it came time to do my research, but lose it I did, finally, after all these years.

I lost it the minute I knew I wanted to use it for a comparison of Amma to the Catholic saint named Padre Pio.

Jane Golden and Thom Nickels on The Road

City Safari: The Golden Years In Philadelphia

By Thom Nickels• Wed, May 15, 2019

There’s no better way to get a sense of the city’s latest mural arts projects than to ride around in a car with Mural Arts Philadelphia (MAP) Executive Director, Jane Golden.

This was my third city road trip with Golden. The previous tours were years ago and followed the same pattern: I sat in the front seat with driver Cari Feiler Bender of Relief Communications, LLC, while Jane sat in the back, a stash of MAP notes on her lap. Not that Jane Golden needs notes, of course, but it’s always good to have something to look at amid the running threads of commentary you always get when there’s a Golden present.

Meeting Jane and Cari for this tour meant walking up Broad Street from City Hall to PAFA, where the Feiler Bender car would be waiting. I spotted Jane on the sidewalk before the car came into view. She was talking with a friend or passerby who had just highjacked her ear. When you’re Jane Golden everybody wants to highjack your ear although once Jane spotted me she was by my side faster than a Steeplechase winning horse.

After greetings are exchanged, I join Jane in the little car that moves swiftly into traffic. Broad Street isn’t too bad even though it is a Friday, traditionally the worst traffic day of the week. We’re on a tight schedule. Ten minutes into the tour, I learn that after me Jane is to meet the former Secretary of Defense (and his wife) under President Bush at the Bellevue for another private city tour of notable murals.

Cari heads down Arch Street to 22nd, then onto the Parkway around the Eakins Oval and near the Spring Garden Street Bridge. Jane is already in bubbling conversation mode, so we’re hitting on some heady topics: homelessness and increasing violence in the city. Jane expresses some worry about the latter, and then mentions MAP’s work with the justice system and the youth offender program that allows troubled kids to help in the creation of outdoor art.

“Art brings us back to the world. I’m always fascinated how people respond to art, everyone connects to it on some level,” she says.

She mentions Philadelphia’s low recidivism rate, the lowest in the country, although a few minutes earlier I had told her that I found it ironic that although Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner promised a liberalization of abusive incarceration laws the opposite of that seems to be happening. More and more of the opioid-addicted homeless seem to be finding their way to the prisons in the Northeast for minor infractions like possession and parole violations.

As Cari heads to Park Towne Place to show me Parkway Daydreams, a colorful and whimsical mural by Miriam Singer dedicated in 2017, I mention the fact that there’s now a regular popular cable TV show about crime in Philadelphia. Jane and Cari both shake their heads in disbelief: what terrible publicity for the city, they seem to be thinking. As an aside, Jane mentions that she has a brother in Clearwater, Florida. We all agree that Clearwater is a nice place to visit but it probably wouldn’t make a good home for tried and true city people.

On the Spring Garden Bridge life springs into action with tulips. The 600 foot long mural, Sing Because It’s Heard, was created by hundreds of kids who studied the work of Diego Rivera and the wealth of Mexican art in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. MAP’s website states that the motif was inspired by the PMA’s fall 2016 exhibition, Paint the Revolution: Mexican Modernism, 1910–1950.

Traffic lights punctuate our art talk, the perfect time to ask about these journalist mini tours. Cari and Jane chime in together. They happen about 2 or three times a year; the last big press tour was with 7 Philadelphia Inquirer reporters in a mini bus not driven by Cari. “Not driven by Cari?” I’m thinking. “That was a really fun event,” Jane recalls. “They were mostly young reporters.”

Suddenly we’re face to face with Times Journey: Patti LaBelle, a mural by Peter Pagast (2004) at 3413 Mantua Avenue. The mural’s muted gray steel colors are fantastic and there’s no sense that the mural needs restoration although Jane mentions that MAP will work on it this summer.

We’re deep into the Mantua area now and the light traffic pattern is still holding up. There don’t seem to be many people on the sidewalks, either. Jane points out two more murals, Wild Iris by Paul Santolleri (1999) and Tim Spencer by Willis Humphrey (2018). With the help of the Wilson Goode administration, Tim Spencer founded and led the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network in 1984, which later became the Mural Arts Project.

A great big Comic Book mural emerges on our right. Jane also calls it The Graphic Novel mural because it tells a kind of story and covers a good portion of the front of the Charles L. Durham Free Library. Although there’s no Far Side or Zap comic characters depicted in the mural, its carefree whimsical nature transforms the immediate urban environment like a visual B-12 shot. Looking at this mural, it is hard to envision Mantua as it once was: a crime-ridden den of danger.

We take another look at the Tim Spencer mural at 34th and Wallace as both Cari and Jane relate how the artist, Willis “Nomo” Humphrey, died suddenly last year in his early forties leaving behind three children. This mural replaces an older Spencer mural that had to be removed.

In an online memorial to the artist, MAP notes how Humphrey “will be remembered for his warmth and kindness, his ability to listen and engage,” and that “his vibrant, complex murals have become cultural touchstones across Philadelphia.”

In discussing the lives of both Humphrey and Spencer (also deceased) a quiet descends in the car that’s broken when a car going in the opposite direction takes a swift turn in front of Cari, causing her to break. While there’s no screeching of tires, it’s still one of those unwelcome city road surprises that would cause many to flip into road rage.

At Belmont and Lancaster Avenue, we’re hit with a battery of murals. Alex’s Lemonade Stand (which reminds me of Whitman’s comment that he preferred champagne to lemonade) is followed by A Spiritual Journey Elevates the Human Mind, a mural that Golden says attempts to universalize notions of faith, spirituality and belief, a hard task for any artist although the mural is apropos considering the name of its anchor building: the Sunshine Food Market.

At the massive MLK on Lancaster Avenue mural by Cliff Eubanks at 40th and Lancaster Avenue, located directly on the spot where MLK spoke to a crowd of 10,000 in 1965, Golden shares her worry that a developer might be building something in front of it soon.

Developers, like a plague of summer mosquitoes, must be monitored because if left unsupervised they could very well cause Philadelphia to go the way of Dresden, Germany during WWII.

The coming and going of developers is a common thread throughout the press tour. Jane would talk about the proximity of a new mural to a vacant lot and then wonder how long it would be before somebody came along and built something to block the mural out.

Although MAP gets three to five requests a day for mural projects, the process is not like snapping your fingers. Jane says it’s a process and that processes take time. It’s fascinating to me that people tend to think of Jane as some kind of genii. “People think that MAP can pull rabbits out of a hat,” Jane says. MAP employs about 300 artists a year and many of these artists have been working for 20 to 30 years.” Jane adds that while she wants to safeguard the positions of these long-term artists, “we have to make space for new artists.”

As we breeze over the South Street Bridge towards the end of the tour, Jane talks about a city mural to end all city murals, and that the epic newcomer will fill the entire AT&T building wall facing bridge traffic. “We did this on a whim,” Jane says. “We never expected the idea to be accepted but AT&T liked it.”

An artist has already been chosen for the project.

Riding up to the Bellevue on Broad Street, Jane spots the waiting black limo that will chauffeur her and the former Secretary of Defense and his wife on another private tour.

But just as Cari is about to pull into a temporary parking space to let Jane and me out of the car, a cab appears out of nowhere and cuts her off.

Student Dentistry

By Thom Nickels• Wed, May 22, 2019

Philadelphia Free Press

Going to the dentist has become an extremely expensive proposition, so it’s no wonder that people who struggle financially have problem teeth. Dentists are abhorrently expensive and few people have dental insurance.

I go to Temple Dental, a clinic run and staffed by Temple Dental School in Philadelphia. Temple Dental was fairly economical ten years ago but the prices there are now approaching normal dentist prices. As for “normal” non-clinic dentists, I’ve had my share of them when I lived in Center City. They charged “Center City” prices and those prices are not cheap.

It’s important to take care of your teeth. That’s why I brush three times a day and floss regularly but all of this attention doesn’t seem to matter when your family’s dental genes point to problematic teeth whether you floss, get your teeth cleaned four times a year, gargle 100 times a day and avoid sweets. Bad dental genes will do you in every time.

It’s no wonder that some people just give up.

My otherwise perfectly charming Center City dentist had to become history when a friend of mine suggested Temple Dental. Still, I was reluctant to give a dental clinic a chance because the idea of having students work on your teeth seemed suspect and scary.

Would the instruments used at a clinic be as good as the instruments used in the office of a downtown dentist? After all, I had heard horror stories: A woman friend told me that at one student clinic she visited a drill broke in her mouth. Imagine that! Apparently, the student dentist couldn’t get a proper hold on the instrument—dainty hands? --and the drill slipped.

On another occasion, a dental student cut himself while working on her teeth and blood from his wound ended up in her mouth. My super cautious friend followed up with a Hep C and HIV test, both of which were negative.

While a dentist has never broken a drill in my mouth, I’ve had to suffer through marathon sessions in the chair as an especially slow and methodical student worked in slow motion, stopping every so often to have an instructor examine the work. In many ways, I’ve been lucky because the treatment I’ve received at Temple Dental has matched or even surpassed my downtown dental experiences, and when I got the bill it was radically cheaper.

But dentists are human, however, and mistakes happen.

Jonathan Beck, in an article entitled, “Should I go to a dental school to have my teeth fixed?” writes that a friend of his once described her dentist as having butterfly hands. “By that standard,” he continues, “mine has rhinoceros feet. Case in point: My week-four visit was the day the fillings started. After about 20 minutes or so of painful drilling on a lower molar, my student called over a faculty member to check the progress—to see whether the tooth was ready to be filled. Not quite, so a few more minutes of drilling, then another supervisor came over to check again. This one looked at the tooth, turned to my student, and informed him that he would have received an automatic failure on the drilling section of the dental exam. “

The best student dentists at Temple seem to be Mormons from Utah or other parts of the West. I don’t know why Mormon guys are attracted to the world of dentistry but I noticed this trend years ago when I asked one student dentist where he was from and he said Utah. When I then asked him if he was Mormon, he said that he was. (By the way, there are no references to Mormons and dentistry in the current hit, The Book of Mormon).

Conventional wisdom dictates that you can “spot” a Mormon student dentist because they are so nice. Mormon student dentists have the copyright on “nice.” This does not mean that non-Mormon dentists are not nice, but the Mormons, mysteriously, seem nicer than the average student dentist. They tend to smile a lot.

One Mormon student dentist was shocked when I told him that I had read No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith which is a 1945 book by Fawn McKay Brodie while still in high school. When I rattled off a lot of other Mormon trivia —in between the insertion of cotton swabs, cherry flavored Q-tip probes and needles--he was bold enough to suggest that I might be interested in going to the Convention Center to hear the current LDS church president speak at an open forum. While I thanked him for the invite, I told him that I was quite happy with my own religion. “But,” I added, “that cross country Brigham Young Mormon wagon train story gets me every time.”

I’ve never had a Mormon female student dentist, at least as far as I know, and that’s probably because female student dentists are less forthcoming when it comes to sharing personal information. Foreign female student dentists tend to be very secretive and remote when it comes to casual chattiness. They are the first to address you as “Mister Nickels,” as well. This is a cultural thing, of course, as nothing off-putting is meant by never calling you by your first name, despite the fact that dentistry is so amazingly body intimate. Dentists, after all, not only put their fingers in your mouth, but they stretch your lips, sideline your tongue, and peer into your mouth as only a lover should.

Once I had a very strong Cuban student dentist who didn’t know the power of his arms. He would drill with such gusto and depth that the residual pain afterwards was the most intense I’ve ever experienced. And it was due to his muscular hands and the power of his arms.

Last year, a Jewish female dentist from New York kept me talking and laughing so much that other student dentists would look over into our cubical and ask what all the commotion was about. Some assumed that we were longtime friends.

Having a different student dentist every year (when the students graduate you are assigned a new dentist) gives you a good window into the types of people who make up the world of dentistry. A recent student dentist, who hailed from India, was initially very formal and decidedly un-chatty. She called me “Mr. Nickels” so many times that I began to think of my father when he wore those crush and fold fedora hats with one of his architect’s suits.

“Mr. Nickels, what will it be, a porcelain or gold crown?”

If you were to ask a child this, they would almost always respond, “A gold crown,” but gold, while it lasts longer in the mouth, could be an object of veneration by thieves and muggers if you’ve no money to give when accosted in some dark city alley and if, God forbid, they discover that the only valuable stuff you own is in your mouth. I’ve heard of grave robbers going into coffins and taking out gold fillings in order to be able to do the gold for cash thing. “I choose porcelain,” I told my student dentist, “not because of thieves but because porcelain looks like a real tooth.” After all, a gold tooth can flash on and off like a neon sign when you open your mouth.

“Most people choose porcelain,” my student dentist said.

Dental veneers are all the rage. Just open an issue of Philadelphia Style magazine and you’ll lose count of all the blinding white fake smiles, so bright they could break glass. Veneer mania has spread throughout society like the Mormon plague of locusts. It started with Hollywood celebrities then worked its way down to politicians, lawyers and real estate agents (the real estate profession has become so “glamorous” one would think that the average realtor moonlights as a model). Contractors and plumbers are now getting into the act, and even yours truly was sucked into the veneer vortex, although what most dentists neglect to tell you is that these marvelous too white teeth only last about a decade.

I once told a friend that I felt exposed and imperfect after a student dentist has spent hours peering into my mouth and poked through the maze of intricate crevices.

This got me thinking about the relationship between student dentist and patient, and whether or not those relationships could ever evolve into something special, such as a romance. As unlikely as this seems, stranger things have happened in life, although with dentistry it’s more than likely that the horrible condition of a patient’s mouth would get in the way of a deeper personal connection even if a powerful personal attraction was there.

It is still true, however, that the intense physical intimacy of dentistry, such as peering closely into a mouthful of flawed teeth and gums, might be said to rival the intimacy of the French kiss.

From the student dentist’s point of view, there must be many mouths they’d rather not explore. These are the mouths, after all, that we hear everyday in the subway or the El or on the road to City Hall, the same mouths that cry up or cry down, use the F word, curse perceived slights on the highway or that say a gentle ‘Thank you’ after a door has been held open for them.

These are also the mouths that have spoken words of love, slandered their neighbor, and in some cases, haven’t seen the bristles of a toothbrush in years.

Mother Divine and Jim Jones

By Thom Nickels• Wed, May 29, 2019

  Philadelphia Free Press

If the walls of Woodmont, headquarters of the Peace Mission movement could talk, they would tell how Jim Jones of Jonestown fame came to visit Mother Divine at Woodmont with a large number of his followers. In the late spring of 1971, having achieved new heights in Peoples Temple business expansion and much success as a traveling evangelist, Jones, who had visited Woodmont before when Father Divine was alive, contacted Mother Divine and asked to visit her at the Woodmont mansion.

Jim Jones chose about two hundred of his most dedicated followers to accompany him on the trip. He explained that Father Divine had failed and that he died before completing his life’s work. Jones had long ago come to understand that it was now his calling to lead the Peace Mission down the same “socialist” path followed by Peoples Temple.

Peoples Temple buses took almost three days to make the cross-country trip. According to Jeff Guinn in The Road to Jonestown, Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, stops along the way were made only for gas and bathroom breaks. When they arrived in Philadelphia, Temple members were housed in Peace Mission apartments although Jones himself stayed at Woodmont. Later, Jones and the members were taken on a tour of the property and treated to a banquet where the dessert was ice cream shaped like flower petals. Mother Divine invited Jones to make a few remarks; he praised the ministry and memory of Father Divine. By all accounts it was a pleasant evening.

The Temple visitors stayed a second day, during which Jones spent time talking with Mother Divine. Jones, however, was dissatisfied. That night there was another gathering for dinner, a barbeque with all the trappings and Jones stood up to speak again. This time his tone was critical. He condemned the Peace Mission and its luxurious trappings, and told the assembly that Father Divine had “conferred his mantle” on Jim Jones. “His spirit has come to rest in my body,” he said.

Mother Divine took offense and ordered Jones and his people to leave the Woodmont estate.

Ginn writes:

The drive back to Mendocino County was tense. When they arrived, Jones gathered the followers who’d made the trip and explained that what had happened at Woodmont was not his fault. Mother Divine had been enthusiastic about merging their ministries under Jones’ leadership, so much so that, after maneuvering so they were alone, she tore open her blouse and insisted that they have sex. Jones refused—‘She flaunted her sagging breasts in my face but I wasn’t tempted.’ This was why she had ordered him and his followers to leave Woodmont.

When Father Divine was alive, both he and Mother Divine knew that Jim Jones had his eye on Woodmont. According to Lori Garcia, wife of Tommy Garcia, the adopted son of Mother and Father Divine, Jones wanted to take over the Peace Mission movement when Father Divine passed away. According to Lori Garcia, her husband Tommy was present at least two times when Jones and his group visited Woodmont. The first was at a banquet but the second time the group visited Mother Divine took Tommy aside and said,

“It is not safe for you to be here,” and had a bodyguard take him to another Peace Mission building. At the other meetings between Jones and Mother and Father Divine, Jones often spoke in churches in Center City Philadelphia. At one rally in 1977, after his eviction from Woodmont, he spoke to a large group of followers on North Broad Street. At that time several followers spoke about cancer and bone-related miracle cures they had received from Jones. There were hymns and then Jones himself, his charismatic voice rousing the crowd into a frenzy of ‘Amens,’ would address the people.

At the 1977 rally, Jim Jones said:

It is written; the love of money is the root of all evil. Love of money is the root of all evil. That’s marvelous. Said that they got the Ku Klux Klan here in Philadelphia now too, and they’re wanting equal time because of Roots. That’s- That’s the thing. That’s all they can see out of Roots, out of our precious people that suffered and bled and died, and then they made us think we made it.

While there was no solid Ku Klux Klan presence in Philadelphia in the 1970s, there were scattered attempts at organizing KKK marches and parades in the Philadelphia suburbs and in the neighboring town of West Chester, formerly called Turk’s Head. These marches were usually small and occurred without incident but in the city of Philadelphia itself the KKK”s presence was more rumor and innuendo than actual fact. The mention of the made-for-TV movie, Roots, however, is an accurate portrayal of the mood of the city in 1977, when race-related issues and concerns were becoming hot topics in the press. Jones’ captivating preaching style had the rollicking cadence of an old time Baptist preacher mixed with the verbal acuity of a Spoken Arts poet. The power and energy in his voice had a sort of messianic fire that held listeners spellbound.

It is doubtful that any of Jones’s Philadelphia listeners in 1977 were aware that as a young kid growing up in Indiana, Jones would kill cats and small animals and then force the kids in the neighborhood to attend the funeral services he would arrange for the dead pets. It is also doubtful that Jones’s Philadelphia followers were aware that Peoples Temple was a gay-affirming church, unlike the bulk of black churches in Philadelphia at the time.

The mid-1970s was a traumatic time for gay rights organizations in the city. The Reverend Melvin Floyd, a former Philadelphia cop who had established Neighborhood Crusades, Inc. with offices on West Queen Lane in Germantown, dedicated his life to ministering to gangs and troubled youth, most notably in the black community. He also fought against street crime, absentee fathers and drug dealing. He was famous in the city for his one-of-a-kind van, which was outfitted with a stuffed dummy’s torso sitting up in a coffin on the van’s roof. The corpse-dummy was supposed to represent the danger and stupidity of taking drugs. Floyd was a controversial but powerful figure in the black community in the 1970s but gay activists often referred him to as a bigot and a homophobe when it came to gay rights. In 1976, one year before Jim Jones gave his 1977 talk on North Broad Street, Floyd was awarded the prestigious Philadelphia Bar Association Award, The Edward Bok Philadelphia Award for his neighborhood activism. The award explains the ambiguity many Philadelphia leaders at the time felt about gay rights.

Much of Floyd’s activism included his opposition to the first Philadelphia gay rights bills that were being proposed in City Council. The bills called for a ban against the discrimination of homosexuals in housing and employment. Rev. Floyd testified at an early City Council meeting and said, “The one thing about everything else that can destroy that kind of manhood is to come up with a generation or generations of homosexual black males.”

Floyd was not alone in his opposition to what was often referred to as “the legitimatization of homosexuality into law.” A multiplicity of churches and religious organizations set up tables near Philadelphia City Hall and promoted the signing of petitions to stop gay rights from being enshrined into law. City Council Bill 1275 was one such bill that never made it out of committee; the suppression of the bill caused an eruption of angry protestors in City Council chambers, mainly lesbians who belonged to an activist group called DYKETATICS. The city was fairly well polarized on the gay rights issue with some church groups, mainly black, telling passersby through bullhorns that the sin of homosexuality caused homosexuals to have rotten teeth.

This prejudice, of course, was in direct opposition to the philosophy of Peoples Temple.

In “A Queer Look at Jonestown,” Irene Monroe wrote about the Peoples Temple for the LA Progressive:

As an “open and affirming” church that welcomed LGBTQs in the era of the Florida sunshine homophobe poster-girl Anita Bryant and her “Save the Children” campaign, the Peoples Temple was a safe and sacred sanctuary. The Peoples Temple marched in Gay Pride and embraced a social gospel of radical inclusion. Jones had a sizeable LGBTQ following that kept growing, as did his African American audience. The LGBTQ community followed Jones and expanded in numbers at each church he had from Indiana, Ukiah, and San Francisco to Guyana. LGBTQ parishioners were involved in every aspect of church life, governance, and activities.

Over a period of several months I conducted many interviews with Lori Garcia. One of the topics that most interested me was how her husband, Tommy Garcia, a boy born in Los Angeles, wound up in Woodmont as the adopted son of Mother and Father Divine. Lori Garcia was forthcoming when speaking to me about how an anonymous little brown boy from Los Angeles wound up in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania.

But that is another story.