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185 The Gurdjieffian idea that we are all asleep and need to awaken, though not too different from the Christian call of “Sleepers, awake!” was a strange concept, but definitely intriguing to me. Under Betty Deran’s influence, I read Gurdjieff’s books and all the books about him I could find, including, and especially, Boyhood with Gurdjieff by Fritz Peters, who seemed to write more convincingly about him than anyoftheotherfollowers.ButunlikeBetty,Iwasnottempted to join a Gurdjieff group or any other organization. Two of Fritz Peters’s books, the memoir of the famous teacher and mystic, Boyhood with Gurdjieff, and Finistére, one of the first gay novels I ever read, have continued to be available in numerous editions over the years, but I had never come across anyone who knew him. As far as I could tell, Fritz had lived his life apart from the literary world, or the parts of the literary world I’ve been involved with. I was naturally curious about someone who had written so brilliantly about both his spiritual master and his own sexuality. His two 19 famous books simply didn’t fit comfortably together in the mind. They appeal to different constituencies which nevertheless aren’t incompatible . I should think this would make him a subject of particular interest, but Fritz himself has remained invisible, both before and since his death in 1971. This is partly due to the continuing hostility of the Gurdjieffian world toward his homosexuality. At the same time it is hard to understand the indifference of the gay world toward the author of a gay classic. After Gurdjieff’s death in 1949, the movement purporting to teach his “system,” like most spiritual groups, developed a decidedly antihomosexual bias. Paradoxically, memoirs of Gurdjieff have been written by a number of his often-prominent lesbian disciples, demonstrating that there was no conflict in Gurdjieff, at least, over their sexual orientation. One can only infer that homosexuality, though not to be proclaimed, was no bar to participation in “The Work,” at least for women. Gurdjieff, himself from a middle-eastern culture that wasn’t hypocritical about or bothered by such things, gave top marks to young Fritz Peters’s boyishly rosy behind in the community bathhouse, where the Master of Eastern Mysticism liked to line up all his naked male disciples in order to compare, with ribald comments , their bodies and particularly their sexual parts. On this last point, Gurdjieff, at least, had no reason to be shy, since he was said to have the biggest schwantz of all. It was after Alma Routsong broke up with Betty Deran that I first heard about Annie Lou Stavely, a teacher of the Gurdjieffian system who was living in Portland, Oregon. Although not a lesbian herself, Mrs. Stavely had been a student of one of Gurdjieff’s lesbian disciples , Jane Heap, in London in the thirties and, after returning to the States at the end of the war, attracted her own circle of students in Portland, where she worked for the state university. On one of Stavely’s “state” visits to the Gurdjieff center in New York, Betty, now living on her own after the breakup with Alma and in one of the Gurdjieff study groups, met her, and immediately fell in love. 186 187 In spite of the refusal of Mrs. Stavely to entertain the possibility of a love affair with a woman, Betty precipitously gave up her wellpaying job in the economics think tank to follow Mrs. Stavely back to Oregon, where she hoped over time to persuade the Gurdjieff teacher that she needed a woman in her life. Meanwhile, the canny Mrs. Stavely seemed quite willing to have someone as capable as Betty around. It was after Betty had moved in with Mrs. Stavely as all-round helper that she received my letter announcing that I had met the elusive Fritz Peters. Astoundingly, I learned in her reply that Annie Lou Stavely had once had an affair with him! Fritz was a tall, buoyant man of about sixty, with the kind of aging-boy looks of a Christopher Isherwood, or perhaps it was the similar barbershop haircut, closely clipped on the sides with a lock over the forehead, and a drinker’s nose. In a free-wheeling age of longish hair and relaxed dress, Fritz persisted in wearing the conventional , slightly seedy suits I associate with alcoholics trying to look respectable—he even wore a bowtie, a dapper...

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