Yesterday, Friday June the 26th 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in favor of extending marriage rights to gay people. Those saying that the court redefined what marriage is need to read the actual text of the decision. Kennedy wrote a paean to marriage, not a redefinition of it. And of course, the usual suspects declared that they would go on with the fight, blah, blah, blah and so on and so forth. That was unsurprising.
But then…afterward, something amazing, something that lifted my heart to a place where I will never again doubt the power of love, and the essential goodness of (most of) my fellow Americans happened. The rainbows came out…
Look…just look…at all the expressions of joy and affirmation. Go ahead and sniff that it’s just kowtowing to the militant homosexual agenda…and surely some of this, particularly among the corporate entities, is Hey There’s A Market There Let’s Make It Like Us And Spend Money! But look, just look for a moment, and the breath and depth of the expressions of joy at the decision. The sincerity of it, the massive scope of it, is something you need to grasp, if you can. Even if your prejudices can’t allow you to see the people for the homosexuals, at least try to understand that there are lots of people who aren’t homosexuals, who are absolutely thrilled that now their fellow Americans who are gay have equal rights in marriage. Look at this carefully, all of you declaring now that you will keep on fighting this, because it’s why you lost, why you will keep loosing this fight.
Everything you think you know about gay people is wrong, and especially, emphatically this: that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. It’s why you keep miscalculating again and again and again our willingness to go on fighting no matter how much damage you could do to us. But more critically, it’s why you miscalculated, profoundly, what would happen when your lies lost their power over us, and we began to live our lives openly. You thought “normal” people would be disgusted when they saw the reality of our lives. You really thought that. You probably still think that.
They are disgusted. At you.
It’s one thing to keep on inciting prejudice and hate at the people who live on the other side of the tracks, in the ethnic and racial enclaves, at Those People that America, to its shame, still largely keeps segregated. It’s another when it’s your own children, your brother and sister, your neighbors, your co-workers, the people in your everyday lives.
Prejudice lies. It lies about other people. But first, it lies to you. You think you see reality, but you don’t. Others, not succumbing to prejudice, loving life, and willing to live in the world as it really is for better or worse, do. Anything that keeps you from seeing the world as it really is, makes you weak. The denouement came with the Proposition 8 trial. You’d built a multimillion dollar industry propagating one pseudo scientific lie after another about gay people you hoped would win the masses over, or at least enough voters. But be honest with yourselves for at least one thing: it was mostly to convince yourselves you weren’t really just a bunch of bigots after all. And when it came time to defend all of it at trial your prize experts ran away, all but two who nearly conceded our case for us on the witness stand. In the end the rest of the country saw your case against gay equality for the half-assed pile of pretentious crap that it is. The witness stand is a very lonely place to lie said Boies. Lonelier still is the bathroom mirror. Your prejudices lied to you. But you let them do it.
Surely you noticed how quickly everything came apart after that. Whatever doubts existed before Prop 8, they are gone now. Our humanity is understood. We are neighbors. We are family. We are fellow Americans. We have been embraced.
And you? Well…you are what you’ve always been. Still able to look at this torrent of love and support from the rest of America, convinced that most everyone agrees with you, and ultimate victory will be yours. So you dig yourselves deeper into the gutter. It doesn’t have to be. Listen to a gay man who gave a little beauty to this world and was wronged horribly and fatally by prejudice: “We are all in the gutter,” he said, “but some of us are looking at the stars.”
We are not all in the gutter, despite your best efforts to keep us there with you. And if you can’t bear to rise your gaze high enough to look at the stars, at least look at the rainbows. They are rainbows of joy and love…from Americans to Americans. Look at them. There’s the way out.
This came across my Facebook stream just now…I won’t go into detail about why it felt like a punch in the stomach. I came out to myself when I was still a teenager, and doing the research, seeing what the closet had done, was doing, to gay men of my generation and before, vowed never to let myself get locked inside of it. But I have seen what it did to so many good hearts, to one I have loved, to so many others who were not so stubborn as I…or lucky…
‘I’m a gay man but married a woman’
Nick, who is in his 50s, has been married to his wife for 30 years. He is also gay.
He thinks his wife had suspicions about his sexuality for years, but things came to a head when he had an affair with a man.
“She asked if I wanted to leave and I didn’t. She’s my best friend really above all else, so we’ve decided we would like to remain together as best friends,” he says.
Nick isn’t his real name – many of the couple’s friends and family don’t know he’s gay and he wants to remain anonymous to protect his wife.
….The couple chose to stay together not for the sake of children – they don’t have any – but because of their feelings for each other.
While the couple have stayed together, they no longer have a physical relationship and sleep separately.
Nick has promised his wife that he will never again have sex or a relationship with a man – he says he owes it to her.
But can he stick to that promise? He says: “I’m hoping so, it’s my intention to. It didn’t feel like a choice in the past, it felt like it was enforced on me. I’m now making that choice that I would like to, in a sense, remain celibate.”
Nick is a member of a support group called Gay Married Men, based in Manchester and founded 10 years ago. Men travel from around the country to attend meetings.
Group founder John says most of the men are older – they married women in the 1970s and 80s when society was more hostile to gay people.
Now society is more tolerant, they are more comfortable with coming out as gay. But why did they get married in the first place?
That last sentence is about as stupid a question as it gets, especially considering the sentence directly before it. Do you really not know why someone, taught since childhood that the worst thing a man could admit to was being a homosexual, that homosexuals are monsters, predators, might wish or do anything to make it not true. Can you not understand why, facing arrest and jail, the loss of family, friends, career, everything, might not want to do anything to make themselves heterosexual instead? Can you not understand how a cottage industry of ex-gay ministries offering bogus claims of a cure, telling gay men that if they just worked at it they could change, might convince many that marriage was the key to their salvation?
They’re still doing it…
They were lied to. There was nothing wrong with them. There was never anything wrong with them. But the lies did their work, kept the hated other from ever finding that happiness and joy and peaceful contentment in love that the scapegoat must never ever find. And that had its consequences…none of which, of course, fell onto the shoulders of the ones who told the lies. Many innocent women had to suffer too, so that gay men would hate themselves. But to that mindset, women don’t matter anyway. Scratch a homophobe, and deeper down inside you’ll find a misogynist.
John says the men are often quite desperate and struggling to cope with no support – many are suffering from quite severe depression.
“We’ve had bursts of tears when people have come because they’re so upset and also so relieved to find out there are other people that are just like themselves. Because that’s part of the problem, because we’re a myth, we don’t exist.
“We don’t exist in [the] gay world – we’re on the cusp of [the] gay world because we’re married men. We don’t exist in [the] straight world. So we seem invisible.”
The group members say they don’t judge anyone and Nick, who helps run the site, says his main message is that people don’t have to struggle alone.
Recently the trailer for the last movie Robin Williams made, Boulevard, was released. IMDB says of it that it’s about, “A married man’s (Robin Williams) long-suppressed sexual identity slowly emerges when picks up a male hooker (Roberto Aguire) and pays him for companionship rather than sex.”
The trailer is on YouTube, and it is so painful to watch, because Williams was such a great actor and great actors don’t just simply make you believe in the character, they make you feel what that character is feeling. It occurs to me that another great actor died shortly after playing the part of a gay man so completely inhibited and uncomfortable and miserable in his own skin it was very painful to watch.
For some of us it will always be a time before Stonewall. A few manage occasionally to struggle into that better world we’ve been working on since the riots, but it is painful, dangerous, heartbreaking. Nobody has the right to judge the ones who stay inside. They have to stay inside their comfort zones. Just consider yourself fortunate, lucky even, you didn’t get trapped in the closet, and keep working for that better world, where no gay kid ever again has to choose between their family, their career, their friendships, and all the hopes and dreams of love and happiness they ever had.
But the “crazy” ones always seem to have a respectable counterpart who makes a respectable living pumping out the rhetoric that ends up in the “crazy” one’s manifesto–drawing crosshairs on liberals and calling abortion doctors mass murderers–who, once an atrocity happens, then immediately throws the “crazy” person under the bus for taking their words too seriously, too literally.
This.
I appreciate that freedom of speech is vital to democracy. I appreciate that. But these sorts of crimes don’t happen in a vacuum. And this kid isn’t the only one with blood on his hands. That said, don’t go looking at the obvious hatemongers either. The screamers. The Rush Limbaughs, the Michael Savages, the Ann Coulters, the Fox News Talk Radio gallery of race baiting demagogues. They may be completely sincere in their hatreds, but they have the platforms they do, because someone paid for them.
Someone paid for them.
There’s the problem. Where is the money coming from to give hatemongers a platform to turn this nation into a tinderbox of mutual hatreds? Who is buying that air time, so enough people can be blindly aroused by hate, so republicans can elected, so the advertisers, the corporations, the deep pockets, that fund the hatemongers, get their taxes cut even more, get regulations that protect workers, consumers, and the environment repealed and financial oversight gutted? Follow the money funding the hatemongers, who inflame the passions, arouse the hatred, that finds its way sooner or later, eventually, to a killer, to a bloodbath, to its source. There’s the problem.
Race hatred killed those people. Without a doubt. But it had an assist from greed. Greed that doesn’t particularly care about race. I put it to you, that without that assist, we would not be reading many of the headlines today that we are. I put it to you, that without that calculation in the rarefied atmosphere of the corporate and financial boardrooms, that exacerbating divisions between Americans, and thereby to break apart the New Deal coalition, was preferable to accepting a world where their right to rake in tons of cash by any means they cared to rake it in might have some limits placed upon it, we might have made real tangible progress toward healing the race wounds of our nation. But it was not to be. Race hatred killed those people. But it was fed, it was kept alive, by greed.
Yes It’s Madness…But There’s A Method To It… (Message In A Bottle…)
Cracked Magazine, which is getting more known for it’s online lists of things (5 Classic Board Games With Disturbing Origins…4 Overlooked Consequences Of Spiderman Joining The Avengers….) just published 5 Things I Learned At A ‘Pray Away The Gay’ Camp. Here’s one of the line items…
#4. They Physically Torture You For Being Gay
“My hands were tied down and ice was placed on them while I was shown pictures of men. Later sessions would include copper heating coils, needles in my fingers, and electric shocks,” all while Sam was shown gay porn.
Then they’d take the coils away and show … men and women holding hands.
“I was never shown heterosexual sex, just heterosexual attraction,” Sam says. “I was just supposed to associate the touch of a man with pain.”
But a gay man is sexually drawn to other men. And in adults, those feelings of desire mature and evolve into deeper feelings of love and intimate trust and companionship. There’s no neat and tidy way to disconnect desire from human intimacy in adults. After decades of doing this to gay men, and witnessing for themselves the results of it, you might think they’d understand the damage they’re doing.
And you’d be right…
Obviously, despite the old saying, you can’t “heating-coil the gay away.” The torture didn’t make Sam straighter; it just made him terrified of sex, intimacy, and general human closeness.
The scapegoat has to hate themselves. They have to accept their lot in life is one of misery and pain and that they deserve it. And more importantly, they must be taught to fear anything that might lift them out of the pit of loneliness and despair: They must fear being loved.
“By the end, even hugging my father brought back flashbacks,” Sam said.
Sam isn’t alone — according to literally every scientific study, that’s exactly what happens to people who go through this kind of thing. Sex and physical intimacy are positive things that human beings seek out because they feel good, and you can’t trick the human brain into thinking something feels good by zapping it or burning it with hot copper coils. It only makes the feelings negative.
Evan Young, a graduating senior at Twin Peaks Charter Academy High School in Colorado, was recently blocked from giving his valedictorian speech and outed to his parents.
With a 4.5 GPA and a scholarship to Rutgers University, Young was selected as valedictorian of his graduating class. Although he had agreed to edit his speech according to Principal BJ Buchmann’s revisions, Young refused to exclude his admittance to being gay.
…
After Young refused to remove the statement from his speech, Principal Buchmann called the student’s father, Don Young. Don recalled the conversation to the Daily Camera:
“Mr. Buchmann called me and said, ‘I’ve got Evan’s speech here. There are two things in it that I don’t think are appropriate. One was he had mentioned another student’s name. And then there was his coming out that he was gay.'”
…
Evan was not allowed to give his speech and was not recognized as valedictorian at his May 16 graduation.
Look carefully: They didn’t just tell him he couldn’t give his speech…they denied him his honors as class valedictorian too. It was a rank the kid had achieved by virtue of his 4.5 GPA. But he was proud. And worse, he was a gay kid who had achieved.
There’s the problem. Gay kids have to hate themselves at least as much as they are hated, if not more. They must know they are unworthy. So they silenced Evan and took away his class rank. If they could have, they’d have erased from human memory the fact that he’d ever been his school’s valedictorian. They had to. The problem wasn’t that he would have told other gay kids that it was okay to be gay, but that he would have shown them by his example that they could rise themselves up and achieve too. That was the unforgivable sin.
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