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by Beau Cadiyo
Growing up, the Freemasons were never a really big part of my life. I remember that they had a hall off of I-8 in El Cajon, and they occasionally hosted functions there for schools - debate tournaments, Saturday-morning pancake breakfast fundraisers, that sort of thing. They also had a complex in Mission Valley for the "Scottish Rite," which hosted really big events in a giant, 1950s building just off the freeway. I can confidently say that I never knew anything about them whatsoever, positive or negative, growing up.
Then, in my senior year of college, two things brought them to my attention. First, I visited the Paramour, and the owner explained to me that it was built by a group of "operative and speculative Freemasons" who not only knew how to build huge buildings out of stone that would last through the ages, but also knew the philosophy of space, how to make a room truly beautiful, how buildings could resonate with the soul in ways that we could not fully comprehend with our senses. Then, later in the year, I was sitting in the college dining hall when one of my classmates, Kendra, came up to me and handed me a flier. Had I heard about the cancerous influence that Freemasons had on the world? The way they were infiltrating every branch of every government to further their nefarious designs? How they controlled the international economy, to the point that ordinary people who were not part of their "fraternity" could never get a fair shake? I had not, and I kept my admiration for their physical handiwork to myself; also, the general negative feelings I had for Kendra, and my low level of respect for her intellect, led me to think that if she was against them, then I would probably be for them.
Maybe six months later, I was getting on a bus in Portland, Oregon, and an old man was struggling to get up the steps. I helped him, and after I sat down, he came over and asked if he could sit next to me. We started talking, and I noticed his ring; I asked about it, and he asked if I had ever heard of the Freemasons. I had!?! Well, gosh, if I was ever interested in joining, I should call him; he gave me his name and phone number, and after I got home that night, I did what he probably didn't expect me to do: I called. He suggested that we meet some evening at his Lodge; he would get more information for me in the meantime. I waited a few days, and called again, but he didn't answer. I probably called two or three more times before the number was cut off. I always assumed he had died in those few days after I had met him, and with his death that particular door closed.
September 11 happened, and I got a girlfriend. Sick of Portland, I moved back down to San Diego and, shortly after, my friend James got in touch. He had graduated in 1998, moved to New York, made a fortune in the stock market in just a few months, and had "retired" to Los Angeles, where he was living the high life, swing dancing at the Roxy, drinking highballs, and dating a string of aspiring starlets and models. He had something to ask me, something important: had I ever heard of the Freemasons? I had!?! He was thinking of joining, and wanted my take on the whole thing. I told him that I was interested, too, and we agreed to join our local lodges and compare experiences.
I was living in Pacific Beach at the time, and contacted the Mission Bay Lodge, which turned out to be just around the corner from me. A man named Dick returned my call, and was very friendly; I went down to meet him, and everything seemed great. The only catch: to join, I needed to have been a resident of California for the full preceding year, and I had only just moved back down - the fact that I had grown up there, and never gave up my Californian driver's license, didn't matter in the slightest. I waited my year and got back in touch with them; soon I was waiting in rolled-up pajamas and a rope outside of a heavy wooden door to be initiated, passed, and then raised as a Master Mason.
It turned out that I was the last Mason that Mission Bay Lodge ever made. Maybe a month after I became a full member of the lodge, they announced that they were closing. Despite my eager, wide-eyed participation, their membership numbers were falling too fast - I was the youngest member by at least fifty years, and they could muster about eight people for a meeting, tops. With an average age of 78, our lodge was literally dying out. It was the same in lodges across the country and around the world; member lists were shrinking and, faced with rising costs and lower revenues, lodges felt forced to "merge" with other lodges to reduce costs and overhead and fill meetings. I was soon a member of the new Old Glory #798 lodge; instead of meeting in Mission Bay, we sold the building and rented a room in the giant Mission Valley Scottish Rite center.
I was still the youngest member of this new lodge by decades, but that didn’t dim my ardor. I joined the Scottish Rite, which, in an effort to boost membership numbers, had reduced the core curriculum down to seven lectures; after a single day of classes, I received the "thirty-second degree" as well as the most secret word. I joined the Shriners, which gave me a fez and let me drive around in parades in a tiny car. I started working my way up the lodge ranks. Life took me to Barcelona; I got to participate in Catalan lodges, where, with my thirty-second degree, I was the most senior Freemason in Catalunya, if not all of Spain. The lodges there had only really started operating after Franco died, and, in the old style, each degree took a minimum of one year to obtain; the highest-ranking Mason in our building was maybe on his twenty-third degree. I still remember showing my visiting card to the secretary of the lodge, who had been a Freemason before I was born and who had been trying to work his way up the ranks ever since and who I outranked by a dozen degrees. He looked at my face, then the card, and dropped it on the table, muttering "puta madre" before suggesting I sit in an honored seat for the meeting, and be offered the gavel to show them how to run a meeting (which I declined).
Once I got back to the States, and moved to Ohio, my membership in Old Glory came under strain. The secretary of the lodge started sending out racist emails from the lodge email account, complaining about the number of Mexicans in San Diego. I wrote in protest to the leadership, but was told that, as the Secretary had the right to use the email system, and these were his own opinions, and they didn't want to get involved with politics, nothing would be done. I immediately resigned my membership, and approached a couple of lodges in Cleveland to join them instead. One had a young leadership, was alternative and progressive, and was eager to have me join them, while one was much more mature, very conservative, and would deign to have me as a member. In retrospect, I am ashamed to have thought of my career in joining a lodge, but that was what the deciding factor was - the conservative lodge would benefit my life as a lawyer the most, so I applied.
I was a member there for two years. In my third year of law school, they had an event at the Cleveland Schvitz, a men-only Jewish sauna. They did this two or three times a year; everyone would sit in the steam rooms, take cold plunges, and drink whisky and eat steak and potatoes together in order to promote fraternity and brotherly love. The whole thing was subsidized by lodge dues.
The lodge used the Schvitz to push for "new members", and we were encouraged to invite men who we thought would be good brethren. I instantly thought of someone to bring: my friend Jason. He had grown up in a single-mother household in Akron, beat the odds to graduate from college, and then went to law school; he was an excellent student, got an offer at a huge firm, and was on the path to immense legal success. He was also interested in the fraternity.
Oh - and he was black.
At the end of the otherwise pleasant evening, Jason went to get his jacket, and one of the older lodge members, who had been in the leadership for years and was a prominent doctor in Cleveland, came over and put his hand on my shoulder. "Just to let you know, this is a private club," he said quietly in my ear, "and we don't let people like your friend in." His tone said it all. Revolted, I got up, got my things, and we left. I submitted my resignation from the lodge, which was quietly accepted; none of the brethren were about to rock the boat on this issue but me.
It seemed that my involvement with Freemasonry had ended, but perhaps three weeks later, I got an email from a guy named Tom, who owned a few donut shops in Cleveland and was a member of a lodge named Halcyon. He and his brothers had somehow heard of my experience at the Schvitz, and they wanted to know: would I be interested in joining a lodge that rejected all of the things I found so abhorrent, and was dedicated to actually embracing people across all lines and boundaries? I went to meet him at one of his donut shops, which was just down the street from my house, and was intrigued: they had a massive lodge building in Ohio City, they existed as the American arm of the Grand Orient de France, and were planning to make Freemasonry a relevant fraternity once again.
I went to see the lodge, and was blown away. It was a massive stone building that reminded me of what the Paramour would have looked like if it had been an event space instead of a mansion. There were wide stone staircases, immense marble columns, and ornate rooms throughout; the chairs were either velvet or leather, the presentation cases were filled with scrolls and silver, and the paintings all bore the names and likenesses of the industrialists who vied with Rockefeller for preeminence and wealth and whose names had been scattered on buildings and streets across the city.
So I joined. They gave me keys to the building and told me to use it whenever I wanted, and an old apron from the 1940s, and got me in the leadership line; soon, they asked me if I wanted to be Master of the Lodge, as Tom and the others were busy building out the national organization, and couldn't be bothered with the details of running meetings. Soon, I had convinced two of my friends, Carl and Orson, to join the lodge as well; they were rapidly promoted to be secretary (Carl) and treasurer (Orson). Importantly for later, without planning it, the main administrative roles of the lodge were all being performed by me and my friends.
Writing this all down now, I have to wonder: was I naive? Was I a sucker? I look back at the conversations we had, at their behavior and actions, and think: no. I think they were really planning on doing something big with Freemasonry, but I fucked it all up for them.
The problem was women. The Grand Orient de France had decided that even if women had historically been excluded from Freemasonry, this was absurd, illogical, and outdated. As a consequence, they ruled that women should henceforth be admitted to all Grand Orient lodges everywhere, provided that the lodges agreed, and changed their charters to allow it. To me, this was wonderful; I never liked the exclusion, and, as with Jason earlier, I had another perfect, willing candidate.
Her name was Jessica, and I remember the very first time I met her, in the spring of 2009. I was also heavily involved in a law school fraternity, which was open to both men and women; I decided to host an event at the Lodge for alumni, and Jessica showed up early, before I had a chance to get the drinks out of my car. She immediately volunteered to help set up, then stayed outside and signed people in - I think she had the genius idea that she could meet everyone first, before they even got in the door. Either way, she was an amazing help, and we got to talking. We had gone to law school together, but she was a year behind me; again, like Jason, she was an Ohio native, had gotten very good grades, and was going to join a huge firm downtown. After the event, we stayed in touch.
Once the Grand Orient had issued their proclamation about letting women in, I quietly started canvassing the members to propose that we, as a lodge, take advantage of this new French liberality to change our own charter to allow women in. Outside of my friends, the response was an almost violent “non.” Each long-standing member I spoke with told me that individually, they had no issue with the idea, but "we have to think of what this would do to the brethren." Over and over, this was the response I got: in order to admit women, we would need to have a vote to change our charter, and if we called for a vote, we would lose for some vague, unspecified, prejudiced reason.
So I looked at our charter, and found something interesting. Generally, a lodge needed to have seven Master Masons as members in order to exist. However, this new French branch of Masonry was very new in America, so in an effort to grow the fraternity in places where they couldn't get seven Master Masons together, the charter said that the Master of any full lodge could create a "Triangle," or a starter subsidiary lodge, that only needed three members. Triangles only needed to have one Master Mason and two lower-degree Masons in order to operate, so the standards were lower. To promote flexibility, triangles operated under independent charters, which the parent lodge did not have any say over; thus, even if a parent lodge did not want to admit women, a subsidiary Triangle could admit women under its own charter. Any newly-admitted member in a triangle would automatically become full members of the parent lodge; thus, any woman a Triangle admitted would be a full member of the parent lodge. To reduce bureaucratic red tape, lodges did not vote on setting up triangles; the Master of the Lodge had full authority to create a triangle, and they were not only allowed to set up Triangles - they were actively encouraged to do so.
And the Master of the most important Lodge in the system who was vested with the power to create these new Triangles was...me.
We read the writing on the wall; the lodge would never agree to allow women. Seeing this, Carl, Orson and I created a Triangle to do it instead, with Jessica's full involvement.
The furor was immediate. I remember standing outside a West Side warehouse in the middle of a Cleveland "lake effect" blizzard on a Saturday in December 2010, talking on my flip phone to Joel, one of our central opponents; realizing the purpose of the triangle, he and everyone else apparently thought that creating the triangle was a violation of the lodge constitution. I asked him to explain, and said I would gladly rescind what I had done if he could explain what was done incorrectly; he dodged, prevaricated, shouted, but finally had to admit that they had written up a charter that actively encouraged me to do exactly what I had done, and they had nobody but themselves to blame if they didn't like the result. He ran an investment company, and was not a lawyer; I explained that if he wanted my advice on stopping me, I would be happy to help, but for the time being, I was going to continue on my merry way until they could convince the Master of the Lodge - a notorious asshole, as I was sure he would agree - to hold a vote to change the rules they themselves had written for setting up Triangles.
Click.
So we had our Triangle, and this Triangle had three members, and its own independent rules that expressly allowed it to admit women. One of the duties of a Triangle was to initiate any new brothers who met the Triangle's charter of membership requirements. Let me amend that - brothers or sisters. And so it was late on a Saturday, in a grand hall with an old organ and massive chairs, that Carl, Orson and I donned our regalia and initiated Jessica into our hallowed fraternity as its first-ever female Mason.
Joel and Tom and the others never found out about this. They DID continue to challenge the existence of the Triangle; we received emails and calls throughout the holidays and into early 2011 trying to convince us to close down the Triangle and submit to their authority. One thing that we realized was that they were keeping this a secret from the other lodges. With lodges in New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, and many other cities, if word got out that the main lodge, the central star in their galaxy, was going rogue, was completely out of their control, then there could be trouble. What trouble? I suppose other lodges might try to admit women, or set up Triangles of their own to do so, which they didn’t want, so they seemed to try everything to convince us to shut down while also not making a big fuss over it. It got so bad, and sentiments between our group and theirs became so toxic, that eventually we collectively decided that we needed to get out. The thing was, we didn’t want to leave without exposing their actions to the wider group. To do so, however, would risk getting into a very dirty fight, which was not at all what we wanted.
Until this point, I had never understood a peculiarity of Parliamentary democracies: abstention as a form of protest. I always heard of parliaments where the Prime Minister was not playing fair so the minority or opposition parties would just abstain from an election - as if not participating somehow increased their power over the matter. But one day, we were thinking over how we could fight back. Maybe one of us saw one of the myriad elections that were happening in 2011, and we all realized what we needed to do.
Secretary Carl was the officer responsible for all official internal and external lodge communications. Early in the afternoon on a Friday - chosen because we could be out of touch, and none of our opponents would be able to or expected to reach us, and it would totally ruin their weekends as they schemed and plotted - he sent out three short emails to everyone in our lodge, the Masters and Officers of all of the other lodges, and the officers of the Grand Orient de France.
The first said that Beau, Master of the Cleveland lodge, was resigning, effective immediately, and would not be available for comment.
The second said that the Orson, Treasurer of the Cleveland lodge, was resigning, effective immediately, and would not be available for comment.
The third said that Carl, the Secretary of the Cleveland lodge was resigning, effective immediately, and would not be available for comment.
Nobody - not our antagonists, our allies, or the Grand Orient de France, could reach us to find out what was happening, but oh, how they tried. The calls came through to my cell phone and work line; our inboxes were inundated, our facebook messages were flooded with one question: “WTF?” We maintained strict radio silence. In place of our story, everyone involved in France and America had to ask questions and form theories and rely on the most beautiful of weapons: rumors.
We had it on good authority that the leader of our opposition, Jeff, was forced to fly to Paris to explain what was happening with his beautiful Mother Lodge. Why did these three officers, who had been touted as the future of the fraternity, resign? He...couldn't tell them. Well, he couldn't without making his side look terrible. So, like Joel, he apparently dodged and hedged and prevaricated. Faced with his evasiveness, and clear lack of control, and fearing some sort of financial misappropriation, the Grand Orient then looked through the accounting books. Meanwhile, other lodges got wind of what was happening and started resigning en-masse, BCCing us on their communications with Jeff. After a few months, we saw an announcement that the Grand Orient of France was revoking the charters of all of the lodges in America, and would no longer affiliate with any of them. The French experiment with Freemasonry in America was over, and with it, the Grand Orient of the United States of America.
In other words, we had accomplished what many people throughout history - Hitler, the Catholic Church, and Kendra of the Dining Hall - had wanted to do, but could not: we destroyed an international Masonic organization.
All over Jessica, and the opportunity to let women in.
She was worth it.
We washed our hands of the Masons, but not of each other. All of us continued to become better and better friends; we met weekly, at least, supporting each other emotionally and socially and professionally. And, twelve years later, Jessica came out to Italy to spend her vacation time with us in Florence.
On the penultimate day of her visit, we ate at Botteghina Caffe Pitti, recommended to us by her husband, an outstanding chef and mindful eater. The porchetta sandwiches were absolutely outstanding - the bread was fresh, the porchetta perfectly cooked and the truffle spread was divine. We had porchetta sandwiches in other places - in the central market, where the rind was still as tough and chewy as a rubber band, and at the famed I Fratellini, where the pork was over-salted and the bread was so dry it was almost a crouton. Here, the overall balance and contrast between the ingredients, as well as the sheer quality, was a revelation; as her husband said, this may be the single best sandwich I have ever eaten.
I was glad to be able to see her again, and grateful for the opportunity to catch up on each others’ lives, but the most amazing thing was that she got to meet my children - she has meant so much to me over the years, and I have so much respect for her, that I want them to know her, too. But I am now faced with a challenge: when my kids are old enough to really know her, how can I tell them about the role she played in my life, and of what we did? How do I communicate to them one of my proudest moments, one of the times I stood up against prejudice and fear and hate and did something big? How do we learn about our parents' friends, about what they mean to us, and why? Because right now, our friends are just a string of adults occasionally interfering in their days, sometimes buying them presents, telling them jokes, acting oddly and making us act differently. How do we ensure, when they are older, that they know these stories, and that they have the same sort of respect for our friends that we do?
I’m not sure I will ever know the answers. But if anyone has any suggestions, I am all ears. At least we will always have the porchetta.
