Alan Cabal

"My desire to assume alternative identities influenced me to choose a theatrical career, which pleased my mother immensely and led to my first residence in New York City, where she and I lived from 1964 to 1967.
—Alan Cabal, "No One Is Listening"

Cabal was born on December 1, 1953 in Bridgeton, New Jersey to a troubled 15-year-old girl who had claimed to have been raped. He was adopted a few months later by Albert and Elizabeth Cabal. They raised him in Camden, NJ, a city that gradually became one of the worst ghettos in the state. His adoptive father was Cuban-German and worked as a chemical engineer in the nearby borough of Glassboro and his adoptive mother was a housewife but later entered the workforce following divorce. His parents had legally separated about six months after his adoption.

Cabal recalls that early on he was a bookish loner with few friends. He got involved in the theatre in New Jersey and then had a career as a child actor when he and his adoptive mother moved to New York City, residing there from 1964 to 1967. He worked commercials, summer stock, off Broadway and eventually Broadway. He made his singing debut onstage with Jimmy Durante at The Academy of Music. In 1965, he appeared in an episode of The Patty Duke Show titled "Little Brother Is Watching You," playing a boy named Stanley. In 1966, he performed off Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre in a play titled "The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden," directed by Thornton Wilder. Cabal played the part of a boy named Arthur in a story involving a family driving across the state of New Jersey. The New York Times gave it a rave. Then, in 1967 he performed on Broadway at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Bertolt Brecht's masterpiece, "Galileo," directed by John Hirsch, playing the young Andrea Sarti.

Living in New York City proved to be formative for Cabal. He became more outgoing, engaging with free-thinking bohemian characters. Unfortunately the experience came to an end when his agent insisted that he and his adoptive mother move to L.A., conceivably to achieve greater success. His adoptive mother, however, would not go through with the move since it would have put an end to the alimony payments she was receiving from Cabal's adoptive father. Instead they moved back to Camden, NJ in 1967 and Cabal entered Woodrow Wilson High School that fall.

Cabal was eventually kicked out of Woodrow Wilson High School. He spent the summer of 1969 as a runaway living in New Jersey in "various crash pads and communal situations" and involved in theatrical productions at the nearby Barn Arts Theater in Philadelphia, PA. He then entered Camden Catholic High School in 1969 but was eventually kicked out in 1971, transferring to Penn Center Academy in Philadelphia where he seems to have graduated in June 1971.

Cabal resided briefly in Philadelphia in the 1970s, working as a dope dealer and a whore on South St. He has stated that he was involved in relationships with men in the 1970s, however, since the break up of his last homosexual relationship in early 1980 he has been solely involved in relationships with women.

In the mid-1970s, he attended Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey, taking classes for two years before leaving the university.

"Religion is very silly, but if you don't take it too seriously, the mythology can be fun.
—Alan Cabal, "The Death of Satan"

From early on, Cabal had a strong appetite for horror fiction, particularly H. P. Lovecraft's works. He dabbled in witchcraft, attempting an evocation of the Devil at age eight. After several more attempts over the years at summoning demons, Cabal began an empirical investigation into ceremonial magick and eventually encountered other people who were undertaking similar investigations, which led to his involvement with Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) and the Temple of Set. He has stated that he practiced various forms of ritual magick on a daily basis for 18 years.

Off and on from 1979 to the early 1990s, Cabal worked at an occult shop called The Magickal Childe located in the Chelsea area of Manhattan. Owned by Herman Slater, The Magickal Childe was a hub of activity for New York's occult scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and had a room in the back that served as a temple which was instrumental in the rise of Aleister Crowley's OTO in New York City. Cabal was involved with the administration of the "Caliphate" version of Aleister Crowley's OTO for nearly twenty years. In 1983 he married Bonnie Wilford, whom he had met in New York City. She was, like Cabal, deeply involved in OTO, and had created a line of occult jewelry that was fairly successful.

Cabal's involvement in the occult eventually began to wane. Though he became affiliated with the Temple of Set in 1995, he was kicked out of the Ordo Templi Orientis in January 1999 for unauthorized XI° initiations. When Slater died, the Magickal Childe was passed on to new owners, eventually going out of business in the late-1990s. In 1997 Bonnie left Cabal.

In 1994 Cabal started doing freelance work for High times magazine under his online name "Garbled Uplink," co-writing with Bucky Dave on issues relating to the Internet that appealed to the High Times audience, such as how to build a remotely accessible hydroponic marijuana farm and how to find marijuana resources on the Internet. These articles are not characteristic of his later work. He held one byline to himself during the period 1994–1995 in his interview with horror writer Whitley Strieber.

Since Cabal began writing for the alternative weekly NYPress in 1997, a common motif in his works is his many references to famous murderers, such as the Nazis, Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, and Melissa Drexler. This lends his prose a fresh, edgy tone. One particularly shocking opening comes in his review of Robert Graysmith's book Zodiac Unmasked: "I love the smell of human blood. I think I would have started killing people for sport. I think I would have done it out of loneliness and boredom." A friend of his has described this same ferocious attitude exhibited in his day-to-day life as "a classic circus-guy thing." A major theme in his works is memoir, a technique he uses to segue into the subject matter at hand.

Cabal has mercilessly directed a lot of his venom and energy at Israel for their conduct in the Palestinian territories and their influence on the United States government, which is apparent in his journalism and his many vitriolic comments in the blogosphere. After Cabal fired off an email to The Jewish Press in 2004 regarding an editorial, senior editor Jason Maoz bluntly noted that Cabal had contributed "some memorably anti-Israel writing" to the NYPress. Cabal has commented, in an email, that his politics come largely from Abbie Hoffman.

Cabal has stated that his interest in the subject of "Holocaust Revisionism" began in 1994, a time when he was also engaged in fierce discussions about free speech on Echo BBS where one member, as recounted in Stacy Horn's Cyberville (p. 212), spoke of being criticized by Cabal for not "taking up the 'challenge' of dealing with speech [she found] abhorrent." In Cabal's view, "Nazis are the acid test of free speech advocacy" and he felt that Echo BBS failed in many respects in its handling of a member named "Parzival" who was a Nazi. One of Cabal's most memorable encounters with "Nazis" occurred in 1974 in Priest River, Idaho at an organizational meeting for the right-wing social movement Sherrif's Posse Comitatus; six months later he left town when the organized Nazis threatened him with death, labeling him a "race traitor" after he made some opinionated remarks that offended them. In 2005, a NYPress editor-in-chief named Jeff Koyen labeled Cabal "anti-Semitic," though he offered no explanation as to how he came to this characterization. Cabal had first mentioned the subject of "Holocaust Revisionism" in one of his earliest pieces for NYPress in 1997 and had promptly been rebuked by the Anti-Defamation League in the letters column for having framed the subject as a debate. His most notable treatment of the subject is "Star Chamber Redux," a 2004 CounterPunch article in which Cabal defended the right to free speech of a noted American holocaust denier named Ernst Zundel. In 2008, Cabal commented in an email, "Calling a spade a spade has its cost vis-a-vis subjects like Israel and Ernst Zundel, and I've paid it, happily."

He resigned from NYPress in 2005 in response to Matt Taibbi's controversial satire about the Pope, "The 52 Funniest Things About The Upcoming Death of The Pope," stating that Taibbi's satire embarrassed him, being nothing more than a "mere insult." Since then, he has infrequently contributed book reviews and essays to High Times and CounterPunch.

FOR A MORE COMPREHENSIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY, PLEASE SEE THE ALAN CABAL BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Garbled Uplink. "Whitley Strieber & The Visitors'', High Times, vol. 240 (August 1995).
Alan Cabal. "Badlands: Burying Camden And My Mom", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 6 (February 9–15, 2000).
—. "When a Stranger Calls: The Ins and Outs of the Collection Trade", Gallery magazine, April 2000, pp. 46-50.
—. "Best Things About Being a Middle-Aged Guy In New York", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 39 (September 27–October 3, 2000).
—. "A Gay Old Time: Out and About in Chelsea", New York Press, vol. 14, no. 22 (May 30–June 5, 2001).
—. "The Doom that Came to Chelsea", New York Press, vol. 16, no. 23 (June 3–9, 2003).
—. "Star Chamber Redux: the Prosecution of Zundel", CounterPunch, February 1, 2004.
—. "Miracles and Wonders", vol. 17, no. 30 (August 4–10, 2004).
—. "How Charles Manson Kept Me Out of Vietnam", CounterPunch, February 6, 2007.
—. "Why Obama Deserves the Nobel", CounterPunch, October 12, 2009.