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What Lois Reed can teach you about elephant garlic.

483-0345

"This is our second season at the Pike Place Market. It's a labor of love. Everything is done by hand-the planting, the weeding, the harvesting, the drying. The garlic doesn't look this pretty until we do what they call 'pulling it down' and of course, that's all done by hand, too.

"Because of its size, people can't resist picking it up and taking a sniff. You'll find this elephant garlic a lot milder and sweeter than other varieties. It can even be roasted whole and eaten like a vegetable. Of course, the trick is to store garlic in a cool, dry place. Don't put it in the refrigerator or you'll break the dormancy of the root. I like to tell people to peel the raw cloves, place them in a jar and cover with plain cooking oil-it preserves the garlic for months and flavors the oil at the same time!" Lois & Don Reed are one of six Market farmers selling elephant garlic in season.

The Pike Place Market. Treat yourself to a fresh

18

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Seattle Gay News

shopping experience everyday.

October 21, 1988

In Memoriam

James Leland Moore Laughing Otter

Thomas Leland

Jan. 11, 1955 Oct. 15, 1988

James Moore, writer, editor, shaman, faerie, died in Harborview hospital last Saturday at 12:30 p.m. after a brief bout with AIDSrelated pneumonias.

James was famous in Seattle as the publisher of Wiggansnatch: a magazine of alternative realities, and as the author of the SGN column Lavender Magick (under his craft name Laughing Otter) and of the pieces he wrote under the name Thomas Leland, dealing with the death 21 months ago of James's lover, Jim Luthi. His clear, precise, vivid writing has also appeared, since he arrived in Seattle in 1979, in numerous other politically aware and radically Gay publications. His Lavender Magick contingent of mixed pagans (Gay, straight, male, female, and of any number of traditions) has been the largest and liveliest section of the last three Gay Pride parades. Since Jim's death, James had also planned and led two all-night AIDS vigils and taken part in many major pagan and neo-pagan ritual gatherings. To the SGN, besides much of the best writing to appear in its pages, he contributed top quality typesetting and caustic last minute editing, not always when it was asked for. The name

A Native American story tells of a mountain lion threatening a community of young otters, and of the sly otter who distracted the predator by laughing behind him, drawing his attention until the others were safe. This story, and not his awesome laugh, was the reason he was called Laughing Ötter by his medicine circle.

The story suited him. Of the pagan community in general he was a valued leader, a student of many traditions and a voracious reader. But James never let respect for tradition or love of learning get in the way of his clear, rational, highly discriminating view of what his religion and, more important, our lives as sentient beings on this planet in the present age, ought to be concerned with. He was fearless in his enmity of cant and his contempt for every sort of prejudice.

Otter's strong discordian streak rather resented promotion to Elder status, which he put off as long as he could. "They expect me to teach," he griped. "I don't know if I want to teach." His natural role, after all, was to sit in the back of a classroom and hurl spitballs. But the initiation had more to do with his writings, with guiding unconnected pagans to the community, and with organizing the Lavender Magick contingent of the Gay Pride March the largest public pagan event in the northwest, if not the country.

His religion

Although beloved by Gay readers outside the craft, by straight pagans and by Lesbians, his chief concern, naturally, was with Gay pagan men. The scarcity of rituals geared specifically to them was a major issue for Otter, and much of his last year was spent working on such rituals and describing his work in his column. On other occasions he turned his famous and malicious wit against excessively heterosexist pagan traditions and those Radical Faeries who seemed to have little interest in deeper spiritual work. Both these groups grieved him precisely because he loved them and they would not live up to his exalted standards.

James was a pagan rationalist. On the other hand, people who did not take seriously the rituals they took part in drove him crazy. He delighted in anything weird (strange comic books and science fiction were among his joys till the moment he died), but he was the man for a witch to see for a reality check. If something in your life, especially your spiritual life, was just too strange to be manageable, Laughing Otter would cut through the crap like a razor.

He took his aspirations to shamanhood seriously, especially admiring the gender-

bending berdache figure of Native American (and Asiatic) tradition. In a midnight reading of Euripides' Bacchae at a pagan festival, he chose to read the part of the transsexual prophet Tiresias, responding to the clipped accents of the king who has denied the ecstatic experience with a rebuke in pure South Georgia drawl, a man of God come down from the hills to denounce the wayward city ways: "You think you know so much, King Pentheus; actually, you know nothin'!" His laugh

The laugh was sheer funk, downhome Georgia, nasal and earthy, rising from the guts, with feeling, into tumultuous peals and snorts. "I used to hear him while I was working in the kitchen and he'd be watching TV," his mother remembers. "I'd hear that laugh and it would just make me feel good all over." It made everyone feel good all over. He'd laugh at your stories and he'd interrupt his own with it. It was audible for blocks, unmistakeable, irrepressible, scoffing, prodigious, rejoicing. He once said he didn't trust people who didn't laugh out loud.

He loved and despised human follies. Like all idealists, he was hurt when friends and heroes showed feet of clay, and he became gloriously catty about just about everyone he ever knew the more he loved you, the more sarcastic he could be, with no diminution of love, when you didn't measure up.

He was in awe of no one. He suspected everybody's motives. And his attitude was appreciated. A local priestess, leading a workshop on revising the structure of the coven, once suggested a high priest and high priestess with absolute powers, leavened by a jester armed with a symbolic bladder, whose duty it would be to swat the almighty ones whenever he thought they were getting out of line. "And you know who'd be just right for that? James Moore," she said.

He was a born anarchist. Persuading him to take any sort of executive role required twisting his armhe'd only do it when convinced the event, whatever it was, would not take place otherwise. Thus he was convinced to lead two all-night AIDS vigils and co-direct a series of rituals for Gay men. He hated being forced visibly to lead or take any credit for such things, but participants in the vigils remember him always at the center of things, keeping the events moving, focussed and essential but laughing, always laughing. AIDS

James was intensely political and served as news editor of several radical or Gay publications before founding Wiggansnatch. But his politics were channeled into the fight against AIDS by the time Jim Luthi began to suffer from ARC in the summer of 1986.

At the time James was working as a typesetter for The Weekly (which he referred to as The Yuppie), but he quit to care for Jim, a full-time job that involved titanic frustrations and duties immensely distressing to the untrained. The harrowing story of Jim's slow death and the toll it took on James is the subject of In a Time of Falling Off and Dying, the series that ran in the SGN a year ago, each segment timed to run exactly a year after the real event. This account of apparently ordinary Gay men dealing with AIDS has been cited by many readers as giving them the strength to deal with it themselves.

Jim died on James's 32nd birthday. A few months later, James related to some of his Circle the end of the traditional story of the laughing otter, whose mate died and who then lay on her grave, refusing food and comfort until he died as well. "I thought about that," said James, "but I've decided to live."

But he never sought a new mate, and, as he wrote in the SGN last summer, much of his life, filled though it was with activity, laughter, and dozens of devoted friends,

See JAMES on page 20.