Some years ago, long before I’d ever ventured out into the Internet, I wrote an essay on my own coming out to myself experience, to post on a gay FidoNet echomail board.  It’s been through many iterations since…mostly to edit unclear or awkward passages and add a bit of clarifying text here and there.  I’ve taken it down from my web site here for the moment, while I give it an update.  But I’ve posted it in response to many arguments I’ve had over the years with online bigots. 

I saw early on that the personal computer enabled us as a people, for the first time in human history, to tell our own stories to the world, in our own words, completely bypassing the traditional gatekeepers of culture.  Ever since I’ve been taking every opportunity to tell these little slice of life stories out of my own life, and encouraged other gay people to do the same.  If we don’t tell our stories, the only people who will are the ones who hate us…the ones who cannot see the people for the homosexuals.  For generation upon generation, the haters were the only ones who were allowed to speak on the subject of homosexuality.  Our voices were silenced, often brutally, so their lies could be told without any fear of being contradicted by the truth of our lives.  No more.  For all the same reasons the totalitarians in China couldn’t massacre thousands of their own people in Tiananmen Square on a Sunday evening, and then tell the rest of the world Monday morning that it never happened, the homophobes can no longer insist that Homosexuals Don’t Love, They Just Have Sex and expect everyone to just nod their heads and accept it as a given. 

But insist they will, because that’s all their cheapshit hatreds allow them to see.  My own personal favorite example of that, happened when I once again posted my coming out to self story on a Usenet message board, in response to a bigots assertion that every homosexual that ever lived got that way because they were molested as a child.  I said I wasn’t…I said that the first sex I’d ever had was with another guy about my own age, and that I was in love, and I reposted my essay, which reads in part…

Slowly and deliberately we drew ourselves closer together.  One summer afternoon we arranged to go hiking.  There was a place we’d both never been to that we wanted to explore.

At a shop where I once worked one of the guys there described, a little too graphically for my taste, the loss of his virginity.  A guy never forgets his first woman, he said.  Actually he didn’t say woman he made a reference to a woman’s organ.  What I’ll never forget that day when I was 17: the moment he put his hands on me.  That gentle tentative touch was electric. 

I woke up that instant from the dream of childhood.  We laid down and took each other all that green warm golden afternoon across the threshold, into the land of adults.  My gym teacher’s ravings and everything else I’d ever been told about what homosexuals were and what it meant to be one disappeared in my first passionate embrace of another male.  And after, breathless and exalted, we looked into each others eyes for, I don’t know, minutes, hours…  To this day I can still remember quite vividly things like the sounds of birds calling each other in the trees above us, the scent of his skin, the feel of his hands on me, the sunlight drifting over his hair in the warm breeze…

I had been an instrument sitting idly on the maker’s shelf, watching curiously the work around me, hearing the first tentative notes of the others along side of me, and not knowing that I too had been created to make this music until that moment when the maker took hold of me, and I felt myself lifted up, and I sang.

Sure as the sun rises in the east, the very next day that gutter crawling bigot posted back, accusing me of putting pornography on the message board.  I’d written a story he said, about "two pervs feeling each other up."

I was gratified to see that I wasn’t the only one reading that message board, who thought the man in question was nuts.  But you need to pay attention to this: All I’d said was that he touched me, and Instantly this man read that as we were feeling each other up.  I never actually described the sex we had, because that detail wasn’t important.  I was writing about my state of mind, about how it felt to be in love for the very first time, and to find yourself one lovely summer afternoon in the arms of the one you love.  And this prize pervert took what I wrote about being in love, and his twisted little mind turned that into some graphic and satisfyingly disgusting homosexual sex scene that he could not take his eyes off of.  And he had to make sure no one else could either.

I’m thinking about this, as I read Michael Medvid’s little Townhall blog post, regarding the change in policy toward gay inmates in the California prison system…

The very idea of “Gay Conjugal Visits” for prisoners sounds like a bad joke, but officials of the California penal system are to worried to laugh. Because of the state’s new “civil unions” law, the gay convicts who linked themselves to partners before incarceration are now entitled to scheduled sessions of intimacy, just like their married counterparts. This means that prison staffers who spend their time in desperate efforts to prevent behind-bars gay conduct, including rape, must now assist selected prisoners with trysts involving their “domestic partners.” This absurd innovation exposes the true nature of the so-called gay rights agenda: it’s not about equality, it’s about governmental promotion of behavior that many Americans still consider disgusting and immoral. Gay conjugal visits should cause the public to look past platitudes about love to focus on the raw actuality of male-male eroticism. Is this practice – with all its hygienic, physiological harm—really deserving of governmental (and prison system) support?

Now…read this part again:  Gay conjugal visits should cause the public to look past platitudes about love to focus on the raw actuality of male-male eroticism.  Sure Michael.  Sure.  Just like the sight of a gay male couple walking down the street holding hands makes you focus on the raw sexuality of their relationship.  Just like the sight of a gay male couple sitting together at a restaurant peacefully eating lunch, content simply in each other’s company, makes you focus on the raw sexuality of their relationship.  Just like the sight of a gay male couple standing bored out of their minds in a grocery store checkout line makes you focus on the raw sexuality of their relationship.  And that’s because you don’t see human beings when you look at homosexuals Michael.  You see monsters.  The monsters your cheapshit bar stool prejudices have always told you they are.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…

They have Sex…they have Sex…they have Sex…they have Sex…they have Sex…!!!!!

Anyone whose mind functions normally might otherwise be able to see the sense in this new prison policy.  First of all, if opposite sex couples can have them, then it’s just a simple matter of human decency to allow it to same sex couples as well.  It may actually serve to Reduce the incidence of prison rape, by lowering the sexual tensions inside prison.  It can serve as an incentive toward good behavior.  And helping to keep couples together while one is in prison, means that when they are eventually released, they still have something to go home to.  Or would you rather dump them back out on the streets with nothing at all left in their lives Michael?   Oh never mind…of course you would.  The emotion of love registers inside your dark little heart about as much as a candle in a blizzard, doesn’t it Michael?  That gray, sterile, brutal toxic human wasteland where love never was, and can never be, and where no inhumanity is impossible, is your beloved homeland, isn’t it Michael?  That’s why all you can see, when your eyes behold a couple, is the sex they’re probably having, isn’t it Michael?  Because that’s the only thing about how couples feel about each other that you Can understand, deep down inside that dark little heart of yours, isn’t it Michael?  And it isn’t just the feelings same sex couples have for each other that completely mystify you…is it Michael?

Pervert.

[Edited a tad…]