White Crane has nothing to do with money. Right? We’re “spiritual.” White Crane has always been about gay men sharing their personal stories of immanent seeking, the questioning, the recovery from the violence done to us, psychically, spiritually, physically, living in a hostile world that has forgotten the great spiritual traditions and roles same-sex people have played for all of history. Money hasn’t really entered into the picture.

Oh…well…sure, there was some postage involved right at the start. Bob Barzan mailed it to about thirty of his friends when he first started White Crane Newsletter fifteen years ago in San Francisco. Postage was 25¢ (30 x .25 = $7.50). There were some minor printing costs for the single fold, four-page letter he sent out. Say, maybe 8¢? (.08 x 30 copies = $2.40) By the second issue the mailing had grown to about 200 (x .25 = $50 + $16 printing = $66.) A revolution on a shoestring.

A few years later, Bob handed the journal off to Toby Johnson—gave it to him, we’d like to point out. Bob didn’t even do the conventional, nominal “sell it for $1.00.” Not that there was a whole lot of real-world, market value to the publication at that point. At most 300 or 400 people were getting the journal (postage had gone up by then…they weren’t mailing just a letter anymore…400 x $1.00 = $400) and the formerly simple newsletter now had to not only be printed, but stapled and labeled. Printing has always been one of the main expenses connected to getting White Crane into your hands in a timely manner. Initial printing costs were comparably minimal, of course. Compared to the sometimes-three-color, almost-glossy you hold in your hand now, it was a bit less, $1 a piece (400 x $1 = $400.) We’re up to $800 and we haven’t even talked about administration…paper, computers, and office supplies.

Bob smartly started inviting people to subscribe as early as Issue #2: four issues for $5. $6 for overseas (isn’t it amazing? White Crane has been international from Issue #2!) So at an average subscription rate of about $5.50, he had something like $2,200 sitting in a bank account. He and Toby always ran White Crane as what is referred to as DBA (“doing business as”) and paid taxes on this income, or, more probably, were able to use some of the losses of running this kind of operation to minimize the taxes either of them had to pay (devoutly to be wished).

Peruse those numbers above and you can pretty well figure the shoestring this journal is run on. Give or take about a $500 cost per issue, with four issues going out a year ($500 x 4 = $2,000) Bob, and then Toby after him, probably had about a $200 cushion left over when all was said and done. Not much cushion, really. And then all of a sudden it seems to be a lot more about money and numbers than spirit and faith.

White Crane has always provided complimentary copies as the sole payment to the generous people who write for us. And there are respected elders in the community for whom we have always provided a subscription gratis. That’s the very least you can do for elders, right? No one was ever making any kind of what could even remotely be called “income” from this. Like we said…money had little to do with the initial impulse to do this.

Except that over the years, as many of you who have been with us from the beginning know all too well, we’ve gone from $5 to very close to $25 a year for the basic subscription (no…this isn’t about raising the rates again, relax…we’re just rounding up.) The fact of the matter is, keeping this journal running takes money and to continue it will take more. Furthermore the fact of the matter is that rather than spending our time writing or working with the writers who make this journal what it is, more and more we find ourselves spending time doing bookkeeping and or what Bo calls “truffle-hunting,” i.e. preparing grants and doing all the leg work to find prospective funders and donors. And believe us, bookkeeping is not our strong suit. You even say the word “bookkeeping” and our eyes start to glaze over.

Anyway, with any luck, the reading herein has been worth every penny and the improvements Toby made, and now we are making, have sort of balanced things out. Hopefully we’re giving you some value for the monetary commitment you’ve made to us year after year. But as Toby handed the journal off to us (again, giving it…there was no “sale”) we realized that we were taking on more than simply the quarterly task of writing and editing and soliciting of writers and laying out of the magazine. Suddenly we needed to get a whole lot more financially savvy and smart.

At the same time, we’ve been writers most of our professional life and we know what it meant the first time something we wrote—something that actually meant something to us, writing from my heart—was bought. It feels pretty damned good.

Buddhist philosophy talks about The Eightfold Path:

• Right View.
• Right Intention.
• Right Speech.
• Right Conduct.
• Right Effort.
• Right Mindfulness.
• Right Concentration, and
• Right Livelihood.

As Fenton Johnson so clearly outlined in Seeking Faith, Right View is “an accurate vision of what’s really happening.” White Crane started with the right view and has remained true to that from the beginning. Gay men, no more and no less than any other human beings on the planet, are inherently spiritual people. Always have been. Right intention was there from the beginning, too: to enable these men to communicate and share their thoughts and lessons with one another.

Right speech, taking care to speak mindfully to yourself as well as others could easily describe this journal. And right conduct—the idea that one acts towards others as you would have them act toward you—is at the very core of the sharing that goes on in these pages. One of the single most important things we do is provide a place where very disparate, sometimes even opposing ideas about matters spiritual can come together. In a world torn by religious strife, this may be one of the most important things we model here.

Right effort—check. Working diligently despite obstacles and discouragement, I can assure you, is something to which everyone who has ever worked on this journal can attest.

Right mindfulness, the idea that we are always focused on these principles and Right concentration…all of those are really quite clearly and adequately accomplished by this magazine.

The only thing we don’t do is provide Right Livelihood. In fact we provide no livelihood. For anyone. And this is what we want to change. We don’t think it’s right. It’s not right.

The world can be divided into two ways of seeing the world: the first is the world as a place of scarcity; the second is the world as a place of abundance. We are of the latter persuasion.

It is our belief that the writers and artists who make this journal happen, to say nothing of the editors, deserve to be paid fairly for their work, just as much as the United States Postal Service and the printer we use down in Texas deserve to be paid (and are) for their contributions to getting this journal in your hands. No one is getting rich. But at the same time there ought to be some recognition in the coin of the realm. Given that we’ve never paid anyone, it’s really pretty amazing the quality of writing and art that has been present in White Crane from the beginning.

So, as we announced in the last issue, White Crane INSTITUTE was incorporated in 2004 as a 501(c)(3) educational corporation in the State of New York. That number means that we are a nonprofit organization. We’ve always been a de facto non-profit. Now we are de jure. Now, not only does your subscription support the journal…your subscription is tax deductible and those taxes can’t pay for any oil wars or “faith-based” science projects!

A lot of people don’t fully appreciate what “nonprofit” or “501(c)(3)” means. In a nutshell it means two things: 1.) none of the principals (i.e. the board of directors) can personally profit from the programs of the corporation and 2.) all profits—or as they call it in the nonprofit world surpluses—must be used to finance the programs of the corporation. So within those parameters a nonprofit can make or raise or receive all the monies it can manage. And what’s more, contributions to the organization (i.e. subscriptions, for starters) are, as they say, “tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.” I like to think of it as White Crane saying a small “thank you” to all of you who have supported us over the years.

White Crane has always operated in as financially transparent a way as possible. We’ve tried to keep you, our readers and supporters, apprised of where the money you send us goes. And we don’t want to continue to increase the subscription rates (unless you all need a larger tax deduction, of course…)

Compared with the cost of other magazines of similar quality, we’re even a little under what most charge for a year’s subscription. And as the adage goes, God helps him who helps himself. White Crane has always been self-sustaining, so our first inclination is to continue in this vein. We’ve entered into a business arrangement with Lethe Press to produce The White Crane Spirituality Series, print-on-demand classics that are currently out of print or hard to find. The first of these, announced in the last issue, is Andrew Ramer’s wonderful Two Flutes Playing. Every purchase of one of these books through White Crane or Lethe Press will provide income for White Crane as well as for the author and Lethe.) We are looking to publish original works as well.

We are looking for foundation support. We want to offer honorariums for writers and artists; sponsor workshops, retreats, conferences, and research; and expand the outreach and circulation of this magazine. Right now we are limited by the number of subscribers we have, which makes our appearance on the newsstands and in bookstores (a frankly limited source of income) difficult. Think about someone you know who would benefit from the wisdom in these pages. And when you’re finished reading an issue, consider sharing the journal with a friend and mention…suggest…that they subscribe.

We are absolutely NOT of the opinion that the Gay community is rife with men (and women) with oodles of disposable income. Yet, surely there must be a few wealthy gay people out there who could see the value in what this journal accomplishes and would endow this effort. We are now in the position to receive support. Our current operating budget is well under $5000 a year without paying anyone anything (again, other than the printers and the post office) and without doing anything other than this Journal. Even doubling that, a grant of $50,000—a tax-deductible gift—could easily carry White Crane for five more years. An endowment of $1 million, invested in an interest-bearing account, could ensure White Crane’s continued existence in perpetuity while enabling us to expand and grow some of the programming of which we think we are capable.

We don't take advertising. We won't take advertising. We only put displays in our pages for people and ideas that are consistent with the mission of the Journal and the Institute. Sure, it’s a fine line, but we create these displays, too, so they are inherently editorial. We will never depend on advertising revenues so we can always remain independent and self-sustaining.

As good friends who have taken on the co-creative work of putting this journal together, we are informed by the traditions and cultures we have been and are part of, (hippies, the Angels of Light, the Radical Faeries, Liberation struggles, sustainability and ecological work, Native America, grassroots organizing) where money is, at best, suspect. Paying for ceremony or services is a constant debate. And yet historically, all of these ceremonies and works were produced through creatively using the currencies of the day. The issue is not about money. The issue is about what we do with it and sustainability. We’re word people. Currency comes from the word for circulation (currents anyone?) How healthy is your circulation? How do we move currency around in a way that will make this amazing publication grow and effect change in the community we love and want to see mature – to be spiritually, culturally wise?

We believe in the work that White Crane does in the world. We believe it is vitally necessary for the growth and maturity of our community. Because the reality today is that queer people live in a vacuum. There is a void in our community. We all find ourselves talking about it in conversations with friends and loved-ones. White Crane speaks into that void with every issue we put out. You won’t find the passing fancy in our pages. No glossy movie reviews or latest fads. You can find that in a hundred other magazines. What you’ll find in these pages and one our website are words that will spiritually feed you today, tomorrow and four years from now. Because spiritual and cultural wisdom don’t have a sell-by date. We dare say that we publish wisdom in these pages that you won’t find anyplace else. We dare say that it is wisdom vitally necessary for the growth and maturity of our community.

So, here’s what we believe, spiritually, about money: We believe we live in a great and wealthy universe/multiverse. We believe there is enough to go around if we have good circulation.

We believe in asking the Universe/Multiverse for what we need. But we must be quite specific about our needs, or we might be surprised at what turns up, especially when we’re asking for as powerful a tool as money.

We are asking for every one of you reading this journal right now, every subscriber or bookstore buyer, to consider if you couldn’t sit down and make a gift to White Crane Institute of a comparable amount to your subscription? If you’ve subscribed for one year, that’s $22. If you have a two year sub, that’s $42. If every one of you did that, we could begin to pay writers and continue doing so for at least two years (freelance writers don’t get paid much. Industry standard is somewhere in the range of 5¢ -10¢ a word.) We could also move from being a quarterly to being bimonthly with the right financial support. Imagine receiving this journal six times a year.

We’re asking that there be a foundation out there that sees the wisdom and merit in what this journal and budding organization do, and sees fit to grant us $50,000 for the next three years. If we had that, we could double or even triple our press run and actively seek out a presence on the bookshelves of Barnes & Noble and Borders and demonstrate that gay men are more than fashion and design. We might as well put a plug in right here to go into your local bookstore and ask them to carry us. That’s one of the simplest things you could do to help us reach more people.

While we’re thinking big about the limitless possibility of this work, we’d like to have you think about how to support this work. You or someone you know may have the means to make a larger contribution to these efforts. What if we had four people commit to making a $25,000 tax-deductible gift to White Crane Institute along with three others. A matching gift. Or ten people making annual gifts of $1,000. The most important thing is we want you to think about is this: how can this conversation can grow?

We’re asking that there be a wealthy individual out there who has the kind of money that can (and will) establish an endowment for White Crane that will provide an annual income on principle for the maintenance of the journal and the development of other educational programs.

This amounts to $1 - $1.5 million dollars.

That used to be a lot of money.

It certainly would be for us.

You may be that person or you may know that person.

Six degrees of separation.

That’s the prayer.