Saturday, July 19th, 2008
Vanity Fair writer Alex Shoumatoff got himself arrested for crashing Bohemian Grove, a private men’s club in northern California for the upper echelon of the rich and powerful. He was there to spy on the three-week camp they hold every July, where said rich and powerful relax while living in tents in their private woods. (Nixon was a member, but called it “most faggy goddamn thing that you would ever imagine.”) The backstory on the weird club, plus the reason for the trespassing and arrest?
Bohemian Grove has been arguing amongst themselves for the last few years about a plan to cut down and harvest some of the trees in their forest, ostensibly to prevent forest fires. Member John Hooper resigned in 2004 because of the plan (even though he owns his own forest, which also harvests trees.) Hooper asked Vanity Fair’s Shoumatoff (they are former Harvard classmates) to write about the tree-cutting for Vanity Fair, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The connection between Hooper and Shoumatoff pissed off the pro-harvesting club members. They sent a letter to VF editor-in-chief Graydon Carter, but Shoumatoff didn’t quit the story. In fact, he told the club’s PR flacks to talk and quit hiding information. (Spy magazine infiltrated Bohemian Grove in 1989, when Carter was editor there.) An excerpt from that article, written by Philip Weiss:
“At this point some hamadryads (tree spirits) and another priest or two appeared at the base of the main owl shrine, a 40-foot-tall, moss-covered statue of stone and steel at the south end of the lake, and sang songs about Care. They told of how a man’s heart is divided between “reality” and “fantasy,” how it is necessary to escape to another world of fellowship among men. Vaguely homosexual undertones suffused this spectacle, as they do much of ritualized life in the Grove. The main priest wore a pink-and-green satin costume, while a hamadryad appeared before a redwood in a gold spangled bodysuit dripping with rhinestones. They spoke of “fairy unguents” that would free men to pursue warm fellowship, and I was reminded of something Herman Wouk wrote about the Grove: ‘Men can decently love each other; they always have, bur women never quite understand.’”
Anyway, Shoumatoff was captured in the woods by a plumber moonlighting as a security guard on the night of July 13th. Update! We hear that he got into the club briefly before being thrown out, contrary to the SF Chroncle reports that he was caught while sneaking in.
http://gawker.com/5025813/vanity-fair-editor-arrested-for-infiltrating-elite-private-club
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Reporter Arrested For Trying To Crash Bohemian Grove
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Only recently did I come across Alex Jones’ sensationalized film on Bohemian Grove. It was only then that I realized that this was “Boys Camp”–this is what I called it since I didn’t know its name–where Fred Starr goes every summer, or at least did during the years I knew him. Sometimes when Fred visited he wore a polo shirt with a small owl insignia on it, which was, he told me from Boys Camp. He expected me to protest the fact that only men were allowed, but I didn’t know enough about it to have an opinion. “Just a bunch of guys drinking beer under the redwoods, with talks by guys like Colin Powell.” Fred gave a lecture there as well, according to a program posted on the net.
Fred Starr is the clarinetist playing at the Gypsy Jazz Club on Alex Jones’ film. I was at that time one of the (who knows how many) women Fred would “disappear with” from time to time. He’s a very secretive, compartmentalizing fellow. I had reason to believe he was an equal-opportunity lover who didn’t sexually discriminate, which was one of the reasons I broke it off. Another was all those other women, who include his wife. Milan Kundera said in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” that, unlike the wife, the mistress has the advantage of knowing her lover’s secrets. But Tomas is not as complex as this man.
I had done some research for Fred one year on Trotsky’s time in Mexico, and sent him a box of bound documents, which he took with him to Boys Camp to read. As a result, the actor John Gavin, who was in attendance, performed a campy skit, along with other actors, on Trotsky’s murder. Very funny, I was told.
Besides actors, some movie producers and filmmakers attended during that time (1996-2001). Fred liked to drop names to try to impress me, but he was fairly tight-lipped about Boys Camp. He considers David Rockefeller his “surrogate father, and he knows Henry Kissinger fairly well. Several years ago he gave Kissinger a guided tour of Central Asia. Maybe that’s a double entendre? At any rate, Fred is the founding chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute (SAIS, Johns Hopkins) and created the University of Central Asia for “HH” Aga Khan.
Now that I know more about what Bohemian Grove is, it’s clearer why everything is kept under wraps. In my opinion it has less to do with the recreational sex that goes on than the fact that, when not engaging in all the frivolity, policy makers are there discussing and perhaps making policy, as well as other decisions, all at a super-secretive boys club. Clearly there’s a lot more to Bohemian Grove than a bunch of guys hanging out under the redwoods drinking beer. Since government officials attend, the public should at the very least be given an annual Who’s Who of Bohemian Grove attendees and transcripts of the lectures presented there.