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News &
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More search rankings
November 15,
2009. Checking the server logs to see how
people find this site, I see that somehow we're on the
front page of Google for a search on "what
is a cult?"
This begs a variant of that old joke. "When you look
up 'cult' in a dictionary, you see Aesthetic Realism's
picture!"
Are Aesthetic Realists still gay?
October 17,
2009. We all know that most of the people
who said AR cured them of their gayness decided
they were really gay after all and left the
group. Some remain in AR, though, and still claim
that they're cured. Either way, many observers have noted
that the "cured" still seem, well, gay. In a draft
of a novel by Sallie Parker, one of the characters
talks about seeing the Aesthetic Realists on David
Susskind:
They were saying, in
these ridiculously queeny voices, 'We ussed to be
homossexsuals, but now we are ssstrraight. We have
found a cure through this new way of looking the
world. A new philosssophy.'
One former AR member believes that those who still
claim to have been turned straight by AR are actually
still gay. He suggested that the supposedly straight
Aesthetic Realists undergo the kind of testing where
their body reactions are monitored while being shown
sexual images of men and then of women. For years I've
offered to pay for such testing, and now, I'll up the
ante: I'll donate $10,000 to the Aesthetic Realism
Foundation if five out of five "changed" Aesthetic
Realists can pass an independent test. Of course, the
Aesthetic Realists have never acknowledged my offer.
Doesn't say a lot about their confidence, does it?
Anyway, the reason for that big introduction is to
give the context for this next bit: I sometimes check my
server logs to see what people are searching for when
they find this website. And a recent search was for
"bruce
blaustein gay" (for which we're #4 in Google).
Apparently somebody has doubts about the completeness of
his "change".
By the way, for those concerned that I'm "outing"
Bruce Blaustein as (supposedly) formerly gay, he outed
himself, in the ads that the
AR people bought in four major newspapers touting
their alleged gay care.
While we're at it, we were also found by people
searching for "aesthetic realism lunatics", and for
"I'm
sick of people telling others to be grateful." (#1 in
Yahoo)
What are they so scared of?
July 4,
2009. A couple of years ago, a friend and I
went to a presentation at the AR headquarters, just to
see if they'd even let us in. My friend also tried to
videotape it, in case they threw us out, or in case
anything else crazy happened. They did let us in, but
soon after we were seated, someone hurried over to tell
us we couldn't film, so we turned off the video, but kept
the audio recording on. Someone else got wise to this and
came over to say no audio, either. So we turned that off
too.
But this begs the question, what the hell are the
AR people so scared of? That I might post it on the
Internet and then people could see what AR was all about?
That's what they ostensibly want, for the whole
world to know about Aesthetic Realism! If they're proud
of what happens in their presentations, then why wouldn't
they want people to know about it?
My best guess is that it was simply their cult
paranoia and vindictiveness rearing its head. I was
taping, and they consider me their enemy, so their
knee-jerk reaction is to try to clamp down on whatever
I'm doing, no matter how innocuous that might be.
So the Aesthetic Realists "won" that round for
sure. They made sure no one on the Internet can be
exposed an AR presentation. Congratulations, guys!
How to rescue someone from a cult
July 2,
2009. The key to getting to a cult member
is love. It isn't logic. It's not reasoning. Let's
face it: If people in cults were able to think rationally
about the group they're in, they wouldn't be a part of
it. That's why, as I say in the post below, perhaps the
best definition of brainwashed is "the inability
to see what's obvious to everyone else".
Cult people have a blind spot about their group,
and no amount of logic will persuade them. This is
partly a result of mind control, and it's partly a result
of cognitive dissonance, which is the idea that it's
exceptionally hard for people to realize they've made a
mistake -- and the bigger the mistake, the harder it is
to own up to.
So if we can't reach cult people with logic and
reason, how do we reach them? Since you can't
appeal to their rational side (at least not at first),
you appeal to their emotional side. Cult members are
human, after all. The most well-known expert on cults,
Steve Hassan, himself a former cult member, talks in one
of his books about how his father intervened to try to
get Steve out of the Moonies. The father tried the
typical persuasive arguments but Steve wasn't buying it.
The father then broke down and tearfully asked Steve
something like, "What would you do in my shoes? I feel
that I'm losing my son." That affected Steve, enough that
he agreed to listen to what a cult exit counselor had to
say. A few days later he was free.
The same former member I quote in the entry below
said
something similar:
The people who had the
biggest impact on me were not the ones who screamed at
me "You're in a cult!" (Believe me, I had plenty of
those.) Rather the ones who made me think were
those willing to care about me as a person, whether I
stayed or left. Despite their initial allure,
cults do not offer unconditional love. When I
saw people on the outside acting differently toward me
than my own supposed all-loving peers, it affected
me. I may not have left right away, but I could
not shake that there was someone who would be willing
to be my friend and care about me with no strings
attached.
Okay, so I sort of cringe about screaming "You're
in a cult!", because I've done my fair share of that.
On the other hand, the story of AR needs to be told
truthfully, and that's what I'm doing. I can leave the
emotional component to those who actually have loved ones
in AR, since I don't, as my immediate family fortunately
got out of the group years ago. I do have an aunt who's
still in, and based on the quote above (which inspired
this entry), I think I'll look her up the next time I'm
in NYC.
People in cults aren't stupid
July 1,
2009. When we see cult people on TV,
following some bogus leader with absolute devotion, many
of us think, "Those people must be really stupid."
But that's not the case. Cults practice mind-control
which makes their followers have a blind spot about that
one thing (the cult itself), but they're otherwise
intelligent people. Aesthetic Realism is a great example:
Its members are accomplished and respected writers,
poets, artists, musicians, and businesspeople. They're
often experts in the professional fields. They're not
dumb by any stretch of the imagination. They simply have
an inability to see the reality about one thing, the
group they're in. (Unfortunately that one thing winds up
consuming their lives.)
Surely you've sometimes thought of someone, "How could
they do something so stupid?" Or you might have
challenged a friend or relative with something like, "I
thought you were smarter than that!" The truth is, people
aren't consistent, and that includes smart people. An
intelligent person isn't intelligent 100% of the time, or
about 100% of things they're involved with.
In fact, this might be the best definition of
brainwashed: the inability to see what's obvious to
everyone else. As one Wikipedia editor commented,
"Outside of Aesthetic Realist
circles, [the statement in question] would not be
considered remotely controversial."
(source)
But I believe this inability to see the obvious is more a
result of mind control than any deficit of
intelligence.
A former member of another cult speaks this in
a
telling piece on the International Cultic Studies
Association:
People in cults are not
stupid. After leaving my former group, I was so
convinced that I had to be intellectually deficient
that I actually took an I.Q. test. Much to my
surprise, instead of scoring way below average, I
scored in the 97th percentile. As I have learned
more about the kinds of people cults recruit, I have
found that I am the rule and not the exception.
Because the rigors of cult life are arduous, these
groups do not want someone who will break down
easily. Cults go after the best and the
brightest&emdash;robbing all of us of people who could
be making a huge difference in this world.
That's Aesthetic Realism, for sure.
Nature's warning signs
June 17,
2008. One thing that amateur marketers do is
to use a lot of exclamation marks. Their idea is that
this conveys how exciting or special what they're talking
about is, but usually, it conveys something completely
different: That the author is desperate to convince you
of something. So after seeing exclamation marks overused
by so many people desperate to convince us of something
(e.g., trying to sell us something via spam), we not only
tend to discount the importance of exclamation marks, we
may also actually distrust those who use them excessively
and gratuitously.
I mention this because this little handbill I got for
presentations at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation is
loaded with no less than six exclamation marks, most of
them completely gratuitous. (e.g., "...we long to feel
that discomforts, fears, can be met gracefully!")
Now, the AR people's whole raison d'être is
to get other people to believe that AR is the ultimate
truth, and it's simply interesting to me how something as
small as a few exclamation marks can unmask their
desperation to sell us on their ideas.
Help for journalists covering AR -- Media FAQ
May 15,
2008. After doing lots of recent interviews
with the media and fielding the same questions -- and
more importantly, learning how the AR people are fudging
their answers with the media -- I put together a
Media FAQ to help reporters with
the most common questions, and to help them avoid being
misled by the AR people's deceptive answers.
Here's an example of the kind of deception that AR was
able to get into the Village Voice article:
...from the 1960s
through the '80s, the Aesthetic Realism Foundation ran
a program intended to turn gay people straight, and
claimed to have successfully "changed" 150 people.
(The foundation ended that program in 1990, and today
insists that "Aesthetic Realism is for full, equal
civil rights for everyone.")
Anyone reading that would conclude that AR had a
change of heart and renounced its gay-cure efforts. But
nothing could be further from the truth. AR did stop its
gay cure program, but not because they realized it was
wrong, but rather because it wasn't working. They
couldn't defend it with a straight face when the media
came calling because most of the cured decided they
weren't really cured at all and left. That, plus a more
accepting view of gayness by society in general, caused
AR to disband its program. But they never admitted they
were wrong, and certainly haven't apologized for it. And
AR's saying that they're for "full civil rights for
everyone" is a clever way to mask the fact that although
they do believe that, they also firmly believe that
homosexuality is a psychological
disorder.
AR gets public funding -- and we get it canceled
May 8, 2008.
Last month I found out that AR had been awarded $4000
from the NY state budget by a NY assemblyperson, Felix
Ortiz. (In NY, a legislator can dole out small grants
directly to non-profit groups, without the whole
legislature having to vote on it.) I alerted the media
which did some stories on how the state was funding an
alleged cult, and as a result it looks like that funding
has now been pulled. (I still need to confirm that the
pull is permanent, but I think it is.) Score one for us!
And thanks especially to the other former members (like
Adam Mali) who agreed to be interviewed, and greatly
aided this effort.
For the record, I'm not too hard on Assemblyperson
Ortiz, since he really didn't know about the darker side
of AR. And as a staunch supporter of free speech, I
believe that AR has the right to promote themselves and
their philosophy as they see fit -- they just don't
deserve taxpayer money to further their private
agenda.
Here are the media stories:
AR member admits AR founder Eli Siegel killed
himself!
May 1, 2008.
I don't know how I managed to miss the significance of
this gem from AR member Arnold Perey when I first read it
on a
Wikipedia talk page:
"Eli Siegel died with
dignity.... What death with dignity means to people
today, thanks to the Hemlock Society and other Death
with Dignity organizations, is that one has died by
his own hand."
So at long last, that's finally a de facto admission
by an Aesthetic Realist that Siegel did, in fact kill
himself! Of course, the AR people are still calling me a
total liar for saying that's what happened. Do you
suppose they'd take it back if I say instead that Siegel
"died of his own hand"?
I doubt it.
Who's afraid to debate?
Feburary 29,
2008. I've had an open
offer to debate the AR people for years, but they
haven't even acknowledged it, much less accepted. They're
content to scream across the Internet that I'm a liar,
but they won't stand behind those words. I've even
offered to have the debate on their turf (at their own
Terrain Gallery) and let them pick one of the two
resolutions which I pre-emptively agree to sight unseen.
But no dice.
It got really comical when AR member Arnold Perey said
on Wikipedia that I'm afraid to debate! That's right, I
made a standing debate offer to the AR people which they
wouldn't even acknowledge, and supposedly I'm the
one who's afraid to debate. Wow.
So last May when I was in NYC, I caught up with Dr.
Perey at the AR headquarters when one of their gatherings
was just getting out. I told him that I would like to
debate him, but he wouldn't acknowledge me. I pointed out
that he'd said I was afraid to debate, but here I was,
making an offer. But he wouldn't respond. I kept
repeating my offer, but Dr. Perey wouldn't say even one
word as he hurried to the car. A friend of mine got the
last half of this on video, unfortunately missing the
first few times I made my offer.
The gay cure in general
Feburary 29,
2008. AR isn't the only outfit that professed
a cure for being gay.
Lots of religious groups tout the same thing. I read
about one such group in the Dec. 27 edition of Las Vegas'
City Life, and the reporter's words really struck
home:
"Problem is, it doesn't work;
psychiatric experts scoff at the notion of changing
sexual orientation; the 'relapse' rate is high; and in
some cases the so-called cure is worse than the
disease..."
That kind of rings a
bell, huh?
Cult vocabulary
Feburary 1,
2008. I just ran across an
MTV article about Scientology vocabulary. While
Scientology and Aesthetic Realism are miles apart in
terms of what they teach, they still share that common
bond of being cults, and thus have some of the same
characteristics. These include specialized vocabulary and
a paronid fear of the media. While reading the article, I
kept being reminded of AR. Here's a telling
excerpt: "A 'Suppressive Person'
(SP) is someone who commits suppressive acts, like
murder, criticizing Scientology or altering [the
founder]'s teachings, according to former and current
members. Journalists are automatically considered SPs
because they traffic in bad news and so are barred from
entering Scientology.". [Update: I just added
a page about AR's special
vocabulary. (4-09)]
Arists' take on Aesthetic Realism
November 1,
2007. I noticed that on the Artists Talk on
Art forum, some people made comments about Aesthetic
Realism in posts from 2005 and 2006. On AR's gay cure:
"[Eli Siegel's] views on
converting homosexuals could have revolutionized The Arts
by discrediting the contributions of: Sappho, Gertrude
Stein, Viginia Woolf, Francis Bacon, Sopholcles,
Socrates, John Milton, Walt Whitman, Oscar wilde, Jean
Cocteau, Leonardo da Vinci, Audrey Beardsley or
Michelangelo." (link)
That's interesting. While I've opposed AR's gay cure
for years or moral grounds, somehow I failed to consider
that when AR condemns homosexuality, it's really
condemning some important and prominent artists -- which
is ironic considering how AR considers itself grounded in
the arts.
There was also some
controversy about an AR person moderating one of
ATOA's panels, wich ATOA members being concerned about
participation by a group that professed a gay cure.
Another writer quotes AR's "Countering the Lies"
website:
"And [Bluejay et al's]
purpose is to have you feel that if you like Aesthetic
Realism (as it is so beautifully easy to do), if you have
a high opinion of it (as a person with a careful mind
will), it's because you've been somehow taken
in."
And here's their comment on that quote:
"So, if a person open mindly
examines and decides that A.R. just isn't their cup of
tea then they don't pass the right IQ test."
Yep, you got it! AR people harbor a lot of contempt
for people who don't like Aesthetic
Realism.
Aesthetic Realism parallels
October 17,
2007. Sorry I haven't posted in a while.
Partly it's because this site has grown so big now, we've
said just about everything there is to say about AR.
But not quite everything. Here are some new
bits. I got another
story by a former member, describing how ARists feel
they have all the answers for everything, and how they
feel qualified to lecture everyone, even strangers, about
how to feel about tragedy in their lives.
I didn't even have a chance to post that story before
I got another email from a non-member, complaining
how an ARist criticized her and her son, blaming any
problems they had on their contempt for the world. It was
interesting to get a non-member writing in to corroborate
when the former member had just said, before I'd even
posted the former's story. (If you're looking for it, I
posted it at the end of the
former member's statement.)
But there are yet more parallels. Last year there was
a lot of hype about a book and film called "The Secret",
which purported to have the answer to how to achieve
wealth and happiness. This is a little different from AR,
since promoting riches has never been a big part of its
message, thankfully. But The Secret's ideas about
how to achieve happiness and success are a direct mirror
of AR's philosophy: it's all a result of your attitude to
the world. Check out what a critic of The Secret
said about it on Amazon:
By far the
most offensive part of the message is the suggestion that
people who have pain in their lives are somehow
attracting it with their thoughts. Darfur rape victims
did not ask for it. Children who are molested did not ask
for it. Starving Africans did not ask for it. To suggest
that their "incorrect thinking" is the cause of this is
sickening. Positive thoughts may help you endure pain,
and help you find meaning in it, but it will not end
random violence, illness and war. Shame on anyone who
tells a sick person that they are manifesting it
themselves, that they don't want to get well badly
enough.
Now compare that to what
a former member has to say about AR:
When people
around me faced issues like loss of love or a job, money
problems, being assaulted or raped, grave illness -- even
life and death -- I had no doubt that I had a grip on the
situation. ... I was skating very close to and often
crossing the line into a blame the victim mentality.....
For example, illness (except for Siegel himself, of
course) was always associated with a person's
contemptuous attitude to the world, and a sick person was
seen as needing criticism to get well. If they died,
well, it was as though they had brought it on themselves
because they had refused to listen to criticism of their
lousy attitude toward the world, and the chickens had
come home to roost.
Aesthetic Realism and The Secret: separated at
birth?
But wait! Here's another parallel: The comedy TV show
South Park had an episode about a gay cure! This was a
bit different from AR's gay
cure, in that the TV show's was based on
fundamentalist religion, but there are plenty of
similarities to AR that just jump off the screen at you
(like the huge failure rate, and the idea that they're
trying to cure something which has no need to be
cured).
If you missed it on TV, here's a torrent
that you can download with filesharing software like
BitTorrent.
High school student says teachers tried to
indoctrinate
July 13,
2006. Gideon Rettich writes:
I was not in any way involved
with this group but two of my HS teachers were. I went FH
Laguardia HS of music and art. There was an art history
teacher named Donita Ellison and an English summer school
teacher - something Rabinowitz.
They repeatedlty taught their
courses from the perspective of AR and we were given low
marks on tests if we did not reflect THEIR beliefs in our
course work.
I never tolerated their
obvious attempt to "rope us in" at our young ages and I
was given low marks because of it.
There are other teachers
involved in AR throughout the eduacation system. They
need to uncovered and fired - they try to convert in the
class room.
Feel free to publish this
including my name.
Thank you for this
website.
More on AR in the public
schools.
#2 in Google
July 13,
2006. We're now #2 in Google for a search on
"aesthetic realism". We can't get much higher than
this....
Spanish teacher teaches AR instead of Spanish
February 8,
2006. From a blog I just found:
"Since the 10th grade I had a
teacher, Carmine Pulera, for Spanish. Mr. Pulera was a
follower of Aesthetic Realism, a cult that, in the 60's
or 70's, had a major influence in shaping NYC's education
curriculum.....Mr. Pulera was also an extremely closeted
homosexual...[H]e always seemed quite guilty
about being a queer, and would, in my opinion, try to
balance this all out by not just including [AR
founder] Eli Siegel in his class discussions but also
God. Mind that this is suppossed to be a Spanish class.
Did we learn Spanish? Not at all. We learned about
Aesthetic Realism however...."
Read
the full blog post here.
We're #3 in Google -- and the story behind it
December 30,
2005. After the AR people published my
mother's name on their website identifying her as a
former member (against her wishes), I asked them to take
it down, and when they refused, I told them if they'd
take it down that I would not seek the #1 spot in Google
on a search for "aesthetic realism". (Previously this
site wasn't even on the first few pages of Google.) They
refused again, and so I began my upward climb.
In order to rank well I'd need to have a large,
impressive site with lots of useful information, so my
first step was to expand my offering from a single little
page into a full-blown website with lots of good content.
And almost exactly one year later, we're now in the #3
spot!
The AR people really shot themselves in the foot here.
Had they simply taken down my mother's name which they
never should have published in the first place, this site
not only wouldn't be buried in Google, but the listing
that was buried would be for a little one-page
missive that was hardly very persuasive. But instead,
now we not only rank at #3, but the listing that ranks
there is for this massive site filled with
testimonials from lots of former members, the transcript
of my lesson with the cult leader, a scan of their ad in
the New York Times that they were hoping people would
forget about, and so much more. They could have
prevented all this, easily. I have to admit that it gives
me some pleasure when the AR people are responsible for
their own downfall.
A year ago, I had mixed feelings about turning my one
little page into a whole site, because I knew it would be
a major effort and I had other things I preferred to work
on, and I would have been only too happy for the AR
people to have taken my mom's name down, not just because
that's what she wanted, but also because that would have
given me the excuse to not have to spend a lot of time
creating this site. But looking back, it's clear that
this site really needed to be done, which is the message
I get from the countless former members who have written
in to tell me so, even if they don't contribute their own
statements themselves.
AR's sneaky advertising tactics
October 24,
2005. The AR people advertise their websites
in Google, as do I with this site. These are the ads that
appear on the right side of the window when you do a
search for "aesthetic realism". Nothing scandalous about
that. Except AR advertises endorsements where none
exists.
Some months ago they ran ad ad that said "Read about
Aesthetic Realism on University's award-winning site, --
mnsu.edu" But the article in question wasn't published by
the university, it was just some professor's personal web
page. Any professor or student can put anything on their
own web page. But AR was implying an endorsement from
Minnesota State University. And it's against Google's
rules to advertise a site other than your own, unless you
have the permission of the owner of the other site.
I contacted the Minnesota State to ask if they'd given
their permission for AR to advertise them that way? No,
they hadn't. They were actually concerned that AR was
trading on MNSU's good name. MNSU must have then
complained to either Google or the AR Foundation itself,
because shortly thereafter the ad disappeared.
But now the AR people are at it again. Here's
an ad I noticed today:
Eli
Siegel's System Lives
The Baltimore Evening Sun reports
on history of Aesthetic Realism
www.baltimoresun.com
The problem with this ad is that it doesn't even take
you to the Baltimore Sun. If you click on it you go to
the AestheticRealism.org website! This is likewise
a violation of Google's policies, and for good
reason.
It's sadly typical that the AR people try to attach
themselves to the good names of others.
More insults from Aesthetic Realists
August 26,
2005. AR people have now taken to sending
anonymous insults through the "Submit-your-experience"
form I have on the website. What I mean by anonymous is
that they not only don't give their name, they also list
a fake email address so I can't respond.
You might say this is a tad hypocritical, since the AR
people have a whole essay on their CounteringTheLies
website complaining vociferously that when former members
tell their stories here they usually choose to do so
anonymously. As I've said elsewhere, it's understandable
that former members choose to make their statements
anonymously, because otherwise the AR people insult and
slander them on CounteringTheLies, and because many
former members are embarrassed about having been in a
cult and don't want that information to be public.
Below is the most recent example of anonymous jabs
I've received. They list their name as "Michael Bluejay,
loner", their email address as "imalone@aol.com", and
their Years-in-AR as "1 month, infant", a reference to
the charge they made against me on Wikipedia that
supposedly my only experience with Aesthetic Realism was
as an infant, which I refute further down on this
page.
Regarding the
impression you give through your description of your
one-person protest: In your experience, have you ever
seen such a demonstration on the streets of New York
consisting of one person? What has been your
impression of that person? Often such people who
demonstrate alone are viewed as loner-types and are
seen by the public as being a little odd to put it
mildly (one-person demonstrators have been parodied in
many cartoons!). After all why can't the lone
demonstrator get others others to join him? Does the
lone demonstrator have any friends? You may have made
some legitmate points on your website, but you hurt
your cause and revealed too much about yourself in
your description of your one-person protest.
This is sadly typical of the AR style of debating:
insult the critic personally, rather than argue against
the substance of what they're saying. CounteringTheLies
is full of these kinds of personal attacks.
Anyway, my response about my one-person protest is
this: I protested simply because it's something I wanted
to do. No one else could have joined me because I didn't
tell them about it beforehand. Most of my friends are in
Austin (where I live), and it wouldn't make sense for
even my NYC friends to protest because they've never been
involved in AR and don't know much about it. As for what
others thought about a one-person protest, the rap that
worked best for me in getting passersby to take a flier
was actually, "I'm protesting this group here, would you
take my flier?" One person doubled around to come back to
get one since he'd walked past me by the time I could get
that out. Would I do a one-person protest again?
Absolutely.
Anyway, it's hard to be hurt by an AR apologist --
it's the AR talking. Especially when they start off by
trying to tell me I was only involved with AR for one
month as an infant (they wish!), and especially when
they're too cowardly to even give their email address
when they send their insults.
I likely won't list any more anonymous snipings like
this on the News page because it will just encourage them
to send more. In fact, I'll go ahead and change the
submission form so that it requires verification of the
sender's email address before I even see the message.
I'm a shameless money-grubber!
August 20,
2005. Today an AR supporter sent me an
impassioned defense of AR's homosexuality
cure, which was fairly unremarkable, but then he
followed up with this:
Just wrote my
experiences in AR to you and when I finally hit
submit, you requested money from me to help your
website pay its Gooogle ad. AR NEVER ASKED ME FOR
MONEY BUT YOU DID. I sure hope you add this to your
site.
Oh, hell yes I will add this to my site! I
couldn't make up stuff this good. Yes, indeed, there's a
little box on most pages of this site (including this
one, on the far bottom right) that encourages readers to
help me pay the advertising bill for this site, since I
pay to advertise it in Google. This is scandalous?
For the record, I've received exactly two (count 'em)
donations in the eight months this site has been running.
That covers a fraction of my ad bill. I pay for the rest
out of my pocket. We could of course compare that to the
head of AR who lives off what AR members kick in
to the organization. But there's really no point.
The really funny thing is in this person's original
message he explained the consultations he took for five
years to cure him of his gayness cost $30 week. That
would amount to $7,500. But we can see where the real
scandal is, can't we? It's the little voluntary donation
box I have on this website.
[Update: A wealthy former member has offered to
underwrite the advertising costs, and whatever other
expenses I have in running this site, so I took the
donation box down. (4-09)].
Who's
afraid to debate?
August 9,
2005. Below I cover some of the B.S. the AR
people have been dishing out on Wikipedia, such as saying
my only experience with AR was as an infant (they wish)
and that I'm just the front person for other former
members and this website is their brainchild, not mine.
(Where do they get this stuff?) But today the B.S.
sunk to a whole new level.
Arnold Perey made this incredible statement on
the
talk page of the Eli Siegel article:
Apparently Michael
Bluejay is afraid to debate.
Here's the response I posted to Wikipedia:
I have no idea what
that is in reference to but geez, can we get any more
hypocritical here? I had an open offer on the front
page of my website for *nearly two months* to have a
public debate with any AR people prior to and during
my trip to NYC in June, which not even one AR
supporter took me up on, including APerey. Each time I
called the foundation to invite them to debate they
even pretended to not know who I was, even though they
created a whole website to try to debunk what I've
been saying (and to insult me personally, of course).
APerey et al had to have seen my invitation too even
without my calling them because the AR people are
quick to react on their website to new stuff I post on
mine -- except the debate invitation. And once I
returned to Austin I've continued to make it clear on
my site that I'm 100% ready to make a special trip
back to NYC once the AR people decide to accept my
debate offer.
So again: Which side is
actually afraid to debate here?
I'm sorry to use this Talk
page for something unrelated to the article but when
the AR people use it as a forum for slandering me then
I want to set the matter straight. And on that note,
Arnold Perey, where the HELL do you get off saying
that I'm afraid to debate when I'M THE ONE WHO MADE
THE DEBATE OFFER! Hello? When you're ready to put your
money where your mouth is I will *gladly* make a trip
to NYC to debate you and/or any other AR devotees. Put
up or shut up.
[Update, Sept. 24: Over a month later,
Arnold Perey still hasn't even acknowledged my debate
offer. Surprise, surprise.]
Protest at the AR headquarters
July 16,
2005. While I was in NYC in June I took the
opportunity to have a little one-person protest at AR's
headquarters in Soho -- conveniently located near
Washington Square Park (where I like to play chess) and
Times Up!, a group which promotes car-free transportation
and has been supporting Critical
Mass. Basically I just handed out little brochures
titled "Aesthetic Realism is a cult", with the contents
being an abbreviated version of the cult
aspects page on this website, plus many of the
quotes from former members
listed on the front page. I did this just before one of
their Saturday night presentations.
It was almost like they expected me, since no one
seemed surprised, and most shuffled past me while making
a concerted effort to not even look at me. I asked
some of them if they'd like a brochure and most didn't
even respond, though a few said "No thank you." When they
did that I thanked them for acknowledging me. Only one AR
member actually took a flier. I wondered how they were
going to complain about my protest on CounteringTheLies
without knowing the contents on the brochure. One member
snarled at me, "Get a life!", which I had to think was
possibly the most ironic thing I've heard this
decade.
I greeted Ellen Reiss and her entourage with, "Good
evening, Ms. Reiss." No response, not even a glance at
me.
One thing obvious from all this is that they're not
drawing in people from the general public, who would
at least have some curiosity about what I was doing and
probably would have at least looked at me, rather
than pretending to not see me. The attendance for their
seminar was made up of the already-believers.
Although AR currently claims to have the answer to
racism you wouldn't know it by the makeup of the group.
As the time approached for the seminar to start it looked
like there wouldn't be even one person of color in
attendance. But then finally a lone black man came up and
entered the building (out of maybe 40 people total).
Still, when your group claims it has the worldwide
answer to racism, this is pretty pathetic.
Most passersby didn't take my brochures, especially
when I said, "Would you like to join a cult?", or "Free
brainwashing, two for one on mind control!", though I got
some smiles about those. The rap that was most successful
was, "I'm protesting this group here, would you take my
flier?" I also made sure that AR's neighbors up and down
the street got copies. In contrast to the general public
the neighboring businesses and galleries were all keenly
interested in what the hell was actually going on in the
AR building.
AR won't debate
July 16,
2005. This won't surprise anyone, but the AR
people wouldn't even acknowledge my offer to debate. Now,
I'll be the first to say that no organization has to give
a forum to its critics, but the difference here is that
the AR people have put up a
whole website calling me a liar and insisting that
they welcome dissenting opinions. That gives them a
pretty frickin' large responsibility to live up to their
rhetoric.
Except that they won't. I had my debate offer on the
front page of this website for weeks before and during my
visit to NYC, and I called them twice. (Each time I
called they pretended to not know who I was, even though
they created a whole website to counter me. Go
figure.)
Anyway, the offer still stands. I'll make a special
trip to New York if and when the AR people ever decide
they're not too frightened of different perspectives.
As in my original offer, we can have it at their
headquarters where they can amass as many of their
supporters as they like, and I'll let them pick one of
the two resolutions, so we each contribute one. I can't
be fairer than that.
More AR dishonesty on Wikipedia
July 16,
2005. Wikipedia
is an open-source encyclopedia where anyone, even you,
can edit the articles. This actually works a lot better
than you might suspect, and a large contingent of users
keeps most of the vandalism in check.
Long ago I edited the
Wikipedia article on AR to add two simple things: A
link back to this site to share an alternate perspective,
and a mention that Eli Siegel killed himself. Not
surprisingly AR supporters immediately censored those two
bits from the article. I added them back, they removed
them again, I added them again, they removed them again,
ad nauseum. So much for being open to criticism, huh?
But now they're taking it to a whole new level, adding
things that are outright untrue. Here's what they tried
to get into the article to try to discredit me as one of
their critics:
"One of the more
persistent critics of Aesthetic Realism is Michael
Bluejay of Austin, Texas, whose connection with
Aesthetic Realism is that his mother once studied
Aesthetic Realism when he was an infant."
First off, my mother didn't study AR "once", she was
born into like I was, and thus studied it nearly out of
the crib pretty much continuously well into her thirties,
when I was a teenager. All my family studied -- my
father, my mother, my mother's two sisters, their
families, my grandparents, etc. My father even lived at
the AR headquarters for a while. We were all believers,
all a part of it.
As for me, after leaving New York for Texas with my
parents when I was five (not an infant) I attended my
mother's AR lectures and her AR study group, and when I
returned to NY when I was 12 I had multiple consultations
at the AR headquarters, participated in one of their
protests at the NY Times (for supposedly conspiring to
censor the truth about Aesthetic Realism), and attended
numerous classes and presentations there.
But even all this is beside the point: I didn't set up
this website to debunk AR the philosophy. I set it
up to debunk AR the cult. Whatever my alleged
unfamilarity with the teachings, real or imagined, that
couldn't be any more irrelevant to my charge that AR
operates as a mind-control cult. And I've provided
exhaustive evidence to back up that point.
But wait, there's more. In the discussion forum on
Wikipedia, AR supporter Arnold Perey dishes out even more
B.S.:
"There is, indeed, an
anti-Aesthetic Realism gang of which Bluejay is only
the most recent mouthpiece..... These web pages of his
on Aesthetic Realism are less than a year old. The
lynchpin of the gang is Ellen Mali of Evergreen
Colorado. Next is her son Adam Mali, now a restaurant
owner there, who wrote a web page of astonishing
misrepresentations a few years ago..... And there are
a few others who also hide behind a screen of
anonymity. This little gang has come out with a stream
of lies that would curdle vinegar. Bluejay was just
enlisted because of his internet savvy, and took to
the job eagerly."
Where does he dream up this stuff? I created my
website on my own volition, without any encouragement
from anyone. I've never met the Mali's. Who the hell is
Arnold Perey that he thinks he knows otherwise?
It comes down to this: If Perey had any
evidence of his claims, he would have presented it. Now,
I'm not talking about evidence to convince you, the
reader, I'm talking about evidence to convince
him. Where did he get this idea that I
"took the job" of creating a website at the behest of the
Mali's? The answer is sad: He just assumes that to be the
case, and so he presents it as fact. And other AR
supporters are only too eager to buy it without question.
Here's what another said:
"I have long felt
Michael Bluejay was just the webmaster for Mali &
Company. Glad to have it confirmed."
Confirmed?! Wow. All I can say is -- wow.
What's on this site
What is Aesthetic Realism?
An explanation about both the AR philosophy and the group that promotes it.
Cult aspects of Aesthetic Realism
Fanatical devotion to the leader, cutting off relations with families who aren't also believers -- it's all here.
Former members tell their stories
A ton of former members explain what life inside the group was like -- and how they're glad they got out. This one is the longest, but most comprehensive. Very moving stuff.
AR and Homosexuality
The AR group used to try to "cure" people of being gay. They stopped that in 1990 because high-profile success cases kept deciding they were gay after all and leaving. AR has never said their gay-changing attempts were wrong.
AR's founder killed himself
AR's founder Eli Siegel killed himself, but the AR people have been trying to hide that fact. They can't hide any more, since enough former students have come forward to confirm the truth.
Secret AR inquest
We got our hands on a tape of a secret meeting inside the group. It's an inquest of an AR student who was supposedly "cured" of his gayness, only to be found still cruising for gay sex. The AR people are merciless with this guy!
AR responds to this website
The AR people have tried to rebut this website with their own site called Countering the Lies, whose title ought to win some kind of award for irony. Here we explain the story behind that site.
|
AR consultation
What really happens in an Aesthetic Realism "consultation"? Now for the first time the public can see for themselves. A former member shared his tape with us. In the session the AR counselors tried to help the member not be gay, telling him that the basis of the cure was to express deep gratitude to AR and its founder.
Thinking of leaving AR?
If you're thinking of leaving the group, you're not alone. Let's face it: Most people who have ever studied AR have left -- and not come back. There's got to be a reason for that. Curious about what they figured out? Worried about the fallout if you do decide to leave? Here's everything you need to know.
Media Reports
The media reports on AR from time to time, and it's never favorable. Here's a list of articles, plus some help for journalists researching AR. And here are direct links to the landmark articles in the NY Post and Jewish Times.
Aesthetic Realism glossary
We explain the real meanings behind the loaded language that AR people use.
My own AR experience
I was born into the group, as was my mother, because her parents were members. This page explains my history in the group. On a separate page I have a transcript of my lesson with cult leader Eli Siegel.
AR in their own words.
Give 'em enough rope...
• Actual AR internal meeting
• Actual AR consultation
• Actual AR lesson
• Actual AR advertisment
• Actual AR ad. #2
• Hyper-reaction to criticism
Site News / Blog
Here's some news and commentary that I add from time to time. |
|
|
Aesthetic Realism at a
Glance |
|
Name |
The
Aesthetic Realism Foundation |
|
Founded |
1941 |
|
Founder |
Eli Siegel, poet and art/literary critic.
Committed suicide in 1978 |
|
Purpose |
To teach Siegel's philosophy of aesthetic
realism. |
|
Philosophy
|
The key to all social ills is for people to learn to like the world. Having contempt for the world leads to unhappiness and even insanity. (The slogan of their newsletter is "Contempt causes insanity".) Homosexuality is seen as a form of insanity caused by not liking the world sufficiently.
Also teaches that "beauty is the making one of
opposites". |
|
Location |
New York City (SoHo) |
|
Membership
|
About 103 (35 teachers, 41 training to be teachers, and 27 regular students). Has failed to grow appreciably even after 70 years of
existence, and is currently shrinking.
Members call themselves "students". Advanced
members who teach others are called
"consultants". |
|
Method of study |
Public seminars/lectures at their headquarters
(in lower Manhattan), group classes, and
individual consultations (three consultants
vs. one student). |
|
Cult aspects
|
- Fanatical devotion to their
leader/founder
- Belief that they have the one true answer to
universal happiness
- Ultimate purpose is to recruit new
members
- Feeling that they are being persecuted
- Wild, paranoid reactions to criticism
- Non-communication (or at least very limited communication) with those who have left
the group
- Odd, specialized language.
More about cult aspects...
|
Open offer to debate
How do you decide which side is telling the truth? I think that would be the side willing to stand behind what he says. Since 2005 I've had an open offer to debate the Aesthetic Realists publicly in a formal format at any time to defend what I've said on this site, and to answer their own charges against me. But the AR people won't do it. Their excuse is, "He's not worth debating." But if that's true, then why did they put up a ninety-six page website to try to snipe at me and to try to rebut what I'm saying? I think the answer is that they're content to hide behind the cover of the Internet, but they know how bad they'd look in a live format where anyone actually got to ask any pointed questions.
You know what's really funny? Someone went to one of their public presentations, said he'd seen this site, and asked about the cult allegations. The AR person said, "It's very easy to say crap like that on the Internet and never have to be challenged." Oh, the irony is killing me!
Anyway, Aesthetic Realists, as for a public debate, I'm ready when you are. And to everyone else, when the AR people won't stand behind what they're saying, why should anyone take what they say seriously?
|
"
There is a very interesting and rather warped dynamic among
the students who left. To varying degrees, we're all wounded
and in varying stages of recovery.
"
"
Your site is a great
source of comfort and excitement to all of us, probably more
than you can tell from the silence of
most. "
-- former AR
student
Open offer to debate
How do you decide which side is telling the truth? I think that would be the side willing to stand behind what he says. Since 2005 I've had an open offer to debate the Aesthetic Realists publicly in a formal format at any time to defend what I've said on this site, and to answer their own charges against me. But the AR people won't do it. Their excuse is, "He's not worth debating." But if that's true, then why did they put up a ninety-six page website to try to snipe at me and to try to rebut what I'm saying? I think the answer is that they're content to hide behind the cover of the Internet, but they know how bad they'd look in a live format where anyone actually got to ask any pointed questions.
You know what's really funny? Someone went to one of their public presentations, said he'd seen this site, and asked about the cult allegations. The AR person said, "It's very easy to say crap like that on the Internet and never have to be challenged." Oh, the irony is killing me!
Anyway, Aesthetic Realists, as for a public debate, I'm ready when you are. And to everyone else, when the AR people won't stand behind what they're saying, why should anyone take what they say seriously?
|
| What former members say... |
| They reeled me in like a brook trout... Guilt was introduced into the experience. They told me I was "not showing respect for this great education I was receiving" by [not getting more involved]. |
| If there is anything the Aesthetic Realists are good at, it is convincing people that if they think they see anything wrong with Siegel, AR, Reiss or how the organization is run, there is really something wrong with them. Any time I began to question things or think I saw something amiss, I had been programmed to think that what it really meant was that something was terribly wrong with me. |
| My new AR friends were starting to apply the hard sell a bit more so the word "cult" did come to mind , but I naïvely believed that it couldn't be a cult because it wasn't religious in nature. |
| They get you to actually control yourself. A lot of people's lives have been hurt --ruined. |
| So, there was Eli Siegel, who came up with all these rules, but to whom none of the rules applied, and there was everybody else. |
| [Eli Siegel] was a hurtful person. He was a sociopath. He was a control freak, and he was a cult leader. |
| Poor John then would be the subject of an onslaught of criticism to help him see his own contempt for Eli Siegel.... This is merely one example of the way people were controlled and humiliated if they stepped out of line or didn't conform to accepted behavior. |
| We all had to present ourselves as essentially miserable failures whose lives were in shambles until we found the glorious "answers to all our questions" in AR. |
| It was very difficult for me to surrender to AR in the total fashion they seemed to want. |
| I received a call from one of the AR bigwigs asking me to donate money to the foundation. When I told him I was low on cash I received a considerable verbal drubbing. |
| I consider my "study" of Aesthetic Realism to be one of the factors that led to the eventual breakup of my marriage, to my eternal sorrow. |
| I felt a bit raped psychologically.... if you are thinking of getting into the AR consultation process, realize that they could end it all suddenly, and that you could find your most intimate thoughts on tape in someone else's possession. |
| They flatter you to death and tell you that you're so wonderful, and you have all these qualities that others have never seen. And then there's this horrible criticizing. |
| That's when I finally knew for sure: AESTHETIC REALISM IS A CULT. I swore on that moment that if I was ever given the opportunity to tell the world what these people did to me, I would. |
| When I left I was definitely shunned by other students. I would meet people in the NYC streets -as I still do to this day - and they would turn the other way to avoid me, or some even made derogatory comments about me. |
| [New AR students] would be shocked if they knew that the lives of the people they are supposed to learn from are very different from the principles they are taught in consultations. Even though publicly the AR foundation preaches respect for people and like of the world, inside the organization the message is very different. The underlying feeling is, "People who do not study AR are inferior to us, and the world is our enemy, out to get us." We had contempt for outsiders and were scared of the world. We huddled together for safety, secure in our sense of superiority. |
| When I was studying, we were allowed to associate with our families only if they continuously demonstrated that they were grateful to and respectful of Eli Siegel and AR. This did not include going to visit them if they lived far away because then we would have had to miss classes, and that would have meant we were "making our family more important than AR." |
| Some of the students I remember going at most intensely and viciously to stop them from associating with their families, (and whom we succeeded in stopping for many, many years), are people who are now bragging on the AR website about how great their relationships with their families are and writing as though that was always the case. |
| There were even instances of students refusing to visit their parents when one of them was dying because the parents did not "express regret" and renounce their unfairness to Eli Siegel and AR. There were parents who literally begged their son or daughter to relent so they could see them one more time, but the child refused. The parent died without ever seeing their child again. Far from being criticized for such behavior, students who went this far were seen as heroes in AR. They received public praise from Ellen Reiss. |
| While I was in AR, I did believe that Eli Siegel was greater than Christ.... It would have been accurate to say I worshipped him. |
| People were told that if their families did not support aesthetic realism, they were not their families. |
| Some of the people with statements on the Countering the Lies website claiming that AR students do not shun former students have actually passed me on the street, looked straight at me, and pretended they were seeing right through me. This includes people in the highest positions in the organization. |
| More and more the AR zombies demanded that I express gratitude to ES and AR. Every paper that a student wrote had to end with the obligatory "I am so grateful to ES and AR for..." along with "I deeply regret that I have met this great knowledge with contempt..." |
| Eli Siegel was an evil person. And I don't use the word evil lightly. |
| See former members' statements in their entirety |
|
