It’s a stereotype of homophobes that they’re closet homosexuals, acting out of fear of discovery and/or self loathing.   And we’ve all certainly seen evidence in recent years that it’s often true.   But it isn’t always.

This came across my Facebook stream this morning…

Anti-LGBT columnist warns men: Lesbians will have your children and make you slaves

The Council for Marriage Policy (CMP), a Christian anti-LGBT group that is a division of the right-wing Renew America PAC, issued a frantic warning on Friday that if same sex marriage becomes legal in all 50 states, lesbians will trick gay and straight men into fathering their children and turn them into economic slaves. According to Right Wing Watch, the 37-pragraph column was written by CMP president David R. Usher and was entitled “Our last chance to save traditional marriage.”

On the face of it this is a rant about same-sex marriage, taken to extreme right wing dystopian fantasies.   But look closer.

Usher’s dystopian screed warned that the Supreme Court will create multiple classes of marriage. In a section called “Class 1: Mother-Mother marriages,” he predicted that “[w]hen two women marry, it is a three-way contract among two women and the government. Most women will bear children by men outside the marriage – often by pretending they are using birth control when they are not.”
…
Gay men, he said, will have the worst time of it under legalized same sex marriage because “[i]n most cases, these men will become un-consenting ‘fathers’ by reproductive entrapment,” although how the devious Class-1 lesbians will accomplish this is left to the reader’s imagination.

I find his concern touching.   But I don’t think what he’s suggesting there is that lesbians will offer to be surrogate mothers for gay male couples and then back out of the deal once they become pregnant.   He’s saying there that they’ll lure gay men into having sex with them.

Now, we gay males are not all perfect Kinsey 6’s, and a lot of us have tried desperately over the course of our lives to be straight, often with hostile clergymen and/or family members pressuring us into it. It isn’t that a homosexual man can’t have sex with women, it’s that he’d much rather have it with men.   But the decent humane society is one that encourages self honesty, trustworthiness, and a habit of truth seeking and truth telling in its own.   The decent society also treats its women as the equal of its men, and this is what I think Usher has a problem with.   It isn’t homosexuality or even lesbianism specifically.

Usher writes…

Men will be forced to labor for the economic benefit of marriages between women – marriages men have been “redlined” out of – by the choice of two women who married with intention to have children by men outside the marriage. This approaches the definition of slavery – and perhaps sexual trafficking or bondage

It’s a crude stereotype that gay men are gay because they’re afraid of women. I am not afraid of women nor do I hate them, they were just never on my radar the way they are for a straight guy.   For most of us, gay and straight, sexual desire is what makes life sweet and we love and cherish the ones that do that to us.   But as some never forgive their libidos for making them gay, and go on a never ending warpath against The Homosexual as a proxy for beating up on themselves, some straight guys never forgive their libidos for giving women power over them.

Usher might well be a closet case but I suspect he’s a straight male supremacist who really hates how a pretty girl can make him all hot and bothered. The homophobia of men like that is really misogyny; gay males draw his contempt for making themselves into woman. That his libido recoils at the thought of having sex with another man makes him feel justified in that contempt.   But really, that contempt, or fear, or loathing, or all of it mixed together, is directed at women.

Usher writes;

“Progressive terminology morphed from “gay marriage” to “same-sex marriage” over the past five years because the feminist power-agenda is not attached to orientation. The feminist goal has always been to create an institution where any two women can marry each other, have children out of wedlock, and force individuals who cannot be part of the marriage to support it economically, with government as a statutory guarantor.”

Look at that…really look at it.   This isn’t about lesbians…it’s not about homosexuality…it’s about women.

[Edited a tad for clarity…]

In friendship you want your reflection, but in love you want your complement.   This came across my Facebook stream the other day…

When arguing for the legitimacy of homosexual relationships and same-sex marriage you hear a lot of talk from the other side about the complementary nature of the sexes.   But there’s the gender you’re attracted to sexually and the one you are emotionally comfortable with and in the best of all possible worlds those two are the same, because that is where the soulmate and wholeness are.

It isn’t always precise, lots of people are completely comfortable in the company of both men and women, and some people fit more in the middle of the Kinsey scale than at its extremes. But sometimes there is a disjointedness.   You see the heterosexual male who is sexually attracted to women but dislikes them emotionally, prefers the company of his buds and treats women as nothing more than sex objects.   And I’ve encountered gay males who are more emotionally secure in the company of women and do the same thing to other gay men.

I feel sorry for those.   Life is so much sweeter when your emotional needs can be met by your attractive sex too.   There is wholeness.   And because heterosexuals mate to their opposite sex, it’s very easy for them to mistake the complementary nature of their relationships for gender.   But the complement isn’t gender.   The complement is the person.

So sometimes you see a same-sex couple and one seems very masculine and the other very feminine and you think ‘a-ha…this one’s the man and that one’s the woman..’ But then you see a pair and you can’t rightly tell and it’s confusing.

Forget about gender.   See how they, as individual people, complement each other.   That is how it always works.

[Edited a tad for clarity…]

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?

Do you think you can tell?
Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange a walk on part in the war
for a leading role in a cage?

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.

-Roger Waters, David Gilmour

Nap dreams are the weirdest ones.

I live on a dead end street. There is an access road that goes to the alley behind my block of rowhouses, but on the maps and as far as the city is concerned Redfern Avenue ends a few feet from my front door. But in my dreams it goes on forever. I walk down it often, though sometimes I also drive. Every car I have ever owned is parked on the gravel shoulders, and every place I have ever lived, and every school I ever went to is somewhere further on. Some nights I walk past them and keep going, just to see what’s there. If you go far enough it is always different then the last time you walked there. Time is like that the further away you get from the world we live in while awake. Just before you reach the beginning of time (or the end, I can never tell), you pass the house of the oldest handyman in the world.

He lives in a little stucco house on the side of a hill. Inside against all the walls are all the tools that ever were, going back to the age of flint, and in the basement and the attic are every spare part that ever had a catalog number. He greets you at the door with a friendly smile and you can’t help but smile back. His face is aged and full of lines and his hair is white as snow. He wears overalls that were once green but now faded and gray. His cap is wrinkled and worn because he often uses it as a handle, and the visor casts a shadow over his eyes, making them hard to look back into; but you never should because if you do you’ll wake up and forget your dream. There is a name patch sown on his shirt, but in my sleep I can never read it.

He can rewire a 1948 GE toaster, make a 1953 Muntz TV work again by passing a small fork made of pure silver over its vacuum tubes until he finds the bad one. He can straighten a crooked door frame by shaking a carpenter square at it. He can fix a Kaiser Manhattan’s seized inline six by tapping its spark plugs lightly with his fingers and humming a tune I can never recall when awake. Once he fixed a broken electrical transformer by calling down the lightning, and directing it through the winds with a magnet he keeps in his pocket.

In this dream I see my first car, a 1973 Ford Pinto, beside the road and decide I want to take a drive in it. But as I get in I notice the paint on it is fading. So I go back home and look online, only to discover that nobody sells that color anymore. A boy always has a fondness for his first car, even if it was mean to him and refused to start sometimes because it was being cranky that day,   so I take a walk to see the Handyman. He is there at the door waiting for me when I arrive, and he invites me inside. I tell him about my car and scratches his chin and then pulls a straight edge razor with a white handle out of his pocket. He tells me to scrape the old sunlight off the hood of my car with it and bring it to him. Paint he tells me, only shows color by trapping other colors out of the sunlight. The reason paint fades he says, is because of all that trapped sunlight wanting to get back out. If I could bring him all the color the paint had trapped, he could make me an exact match of the original factory color. So I walk back to the Pinto and began to scrap the old sunlight off it. It takes weeks.

Eventually I have a small bar of trapped sunlight, dirty orange in color and the consistency of wet clay. I bring it to the Handyman and he puts it into a can of white paint. The paint he tells me, will free the sunlight, taking its color with it out of the white, leaving behind only the color my car was when it left the factory. He pokes a finger into the paint and begins to stir it and it turns a bright blue, exactly like my car was before.

I stare into the blue and it gets brighter and brighter…and I wake up.

Nap dreams are the weirdest ones.