“Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life.” -Merle Shain
“It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.” — Jonathan Safran Foer
“I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.” — Haruki Murakami
“There’s just something obvious about emptiness, even when you try to convince yourself otherwise. ” — Sarah Dessen
“Nothing has an unlikely quality. It is heavy.” — Jeanette Winterson
“Grief … gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.” — C.S. Lewis
“To me, you were more than just a person. You were a place where I finally felt at home.” — Denice Envall
Except it was all fake. Teenagers in love put each other up on pedestals all the time. That’s okay. Teenagers can do that. Just know that when you grow up you’ll have to accept that not everyone actually belonged there. Prince Charming isn’t someone you find. He’s someone you awaken inside of another. If he’s in there. They’re not always in there. That doesn’t make you the fool. What was inside of you was real, even if what you thought you saw inside of him wasn’t.
I didn’t buy Spirit, my Mercedes-Benz diesel sedan because I wanted a status symbol. What I wanted was a Mercedes-Benz, because I believe them to be the best built, best engineered cars made, and I like having solid things in my life. It’s a pattern that runs all through my life. When I was a teenager and I needed a new tool I bought Craftsman. I couldn’t afford the entire sets so I bought the individual tools one at a time. When I turned 40 and I finally was able to afford an apartment of my own and I needed a vacuum cleaner, I bought a Kirby. That was back in 1993 and I still have it, it still does its job without complaint, and all I’ve ever needed to replace on it besides the bags is the roller brush and some belts.
When I was a teenager, the saying was the first hundred-thousand miles on a Mercedes diesel is just for breaking it in. I was looking at a news article a couple months back about a man somewhere on the Mediterranean coast, a taxi cab driver, still plying his trade with the Mercedes diesel sedan he bought new in the 1970s, that had nearly two million miles on it. And it was no junker; there was a photo of the proud owner standing next to it, and from the look of the car and with the old Mediterranean buildings behind them you’d have thought it was taken in the 70s. Building a car, building anything, to that level of quality and durability (provided you take care of it) costs money, which is why they’re expensive.
The essential idea behind the Mercedes-Benz philosophy is this: if the car is properly cared for, it will work out to be cheaper in the long run. While Mercedes-Benz is rightly associated with luxury, its cars are also built to stay on the road for as long as you care to drive them. -From the article, Why Does Mercedes-Benz Require OEM?
I appreciate that the purchase price makes them status symbols in the eyes of some. They have no art in their souls.
I posted this to my Facebook page while on the road last month…
Gave Spirit a run through the best car wash in town. They did an excellent job inside and out. Because while the driver may accumulate road dust as the miles go by, the car must always look its best.
And so it did. The car wash wasn’t all that far from my motel, and when I got there I could see it was as popular with the locals as the Auto Spa is here. And like Auto Spa, the run through the wash was only a first step. After the cars came out, they were parked out front and attended to by a bunch of energetic youngsters, with portable vacuums, electric buffing tools, spray on tire treatment, and so forth. People brought their cars there to give them the works. I didn’t see a single car while I was there just roll out of the wash and drive off. Nobody was getting the budget wash, at least not that day.
We all sat in the Please Wait Here section, outfitted with vending machines and places to set and watch the finish work being done on our cars. It was an impressive operation. I glanced around at the faces among us, all watching the process raptly, even as they were chatting with their neighbors. Every one of those cars was its owner’s baby. I chatted briefly with a young lady who’s mini SUV came out just before mine. She’d just bought it and was the happy new car owner. A new model Mustang convertible came out after mine and I glanced around to see which face lit up. It was a middle aged guy who had more the serious minded businessman’s look about him than a Mustang owner. It’s not unconditionally true, but if you see a car that’s being meticulously taken care of, it’s the owner’s inner self. Yes, I am a Mercedes diesel sedan kind of guy…
“The Mercedes-Benz diesel-powered mid-size sedan is as durable a notion as you’ll find in autodom. Mercedes created the world’s first production diesel-powered passenger car in 1935 and began putting oil burners in its mid-sizers (a.k.a. Pontons) in 1955. The very words “Mercedes diesel” conjure all kinds of associations, from college professors who have forsaken their Peugeots, to wiry German mechanics, to cab drivers in Kabul. It’s an archetype; a 911 Turbo for meerschaum-smoking squares, a Shelby Mustang for people who got beat up in high school…” –Eddie Alterman, Car and Driver.
Just before they finished with Spirit, an absolutely huge pimped out pickup truck came out of the wash. I was surprised it even fit. Jacked up, oversize tires, painted in a gaudy two-tone orange and red, spotlights on the front, on the top, blue sideboard running lights…you get the picture. I looked around. Next to me a thirty-something young guy in khakis and a polo shirt smiles at me. “You like it?” he asks. “It’s mine.”
“Impressive” says I, smiling back, trying to be polite. Insulting someone’s car is on a par with insulting their mother. And really, whatever floats your boat is fine with me if I can see you’re really into taking care of it.
“It’s for sale.” he says. Ah, thinks I, this is why he’s here…to make it look nice for the classifieds. For a moment I feel sad for the pickup. It’s one of the big GMCs. Under all that makeup there’s probably a pretty solid American made truck in there. But he’s found another love and needs some money. But I am not a potential sale.
I point to the lovely metallic blue four door Mercedes-Benz in the lot. “That’s mine” says I. Mr. Pimped Out Pickup’s smile kinda freezes on his face.
“It’s got just over ninety-four thousand on it,” I add. “Almost broken in.”
The Past Is Prologue. Prologue Is A Cold Hearted Mother.
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, in relation to A Coming Out Story, is how the unique window of time my generation of gay kids grew up in…a time when you could see a better world was possible, and accept yourself just as you are without shame, but still a time when it was very very dangerous to be openly gay…really screwed with us in its own horrible way. You could fall in love with another guy, and feel absolutely wonderful about it. And yet you were living in a world where you couldn’t tell anyone.
Try to imagine how that is. The most wonderful thing ever has happened to you, and you can’t tell a soul. You can’t talk it out with someone you trust, because there is no one you can trust with it. You are walking through a potential minefield of emotions all by yourself. And when something blows up in your face, you still can’t tell anyone.
I inherited mom’s diaries after she passed away. Hardest parts to read are the pages where, years after I graduated, she would write sadly about how her sweet cheerful boy had turned all sullen and angry and how she wished she had the sweet cheerful boy back.
I have an outline of this worked out in the script (if you can call it that) for ACOS. It’s something I’ll go into thoroughly at the end of this next chapter. But I haven’t even begun this next chapter yet and I really need to get there and tell this part of it.
Because I can see a little better now how that past where I had to keep everything inside and I couldn’t talk it out with anyone…not mom, not my friends, not any of my classmates, no one, really really left its mark on me. You can feel absolutely wonderful about that first love, and not even notice how having to deal with it in a world that hates you is cutting you up inside.
And later on in life, when that past comes up and taps you on the shoulder, and maybe throws a pie in your face, you still really can’t talk to anyone about it, because there isn’t anybody you know who remembers that part of your past, and how deeply it affected you, because you kept it hidden. Nobody knew.
I wake up this morning from what my Fitbit confirms was a really lousy night’s sleep. Ten hours, but sprinkled within that two periods of wakefulness and 23 (!) periods of restlessness. I turn on my morning Pandora station, a generic “Relaxation Radio” channel. It starts playing a lovely, relaxing piano melody. Now I’m beginning to feel a tad better. So I look to see what it is that’s playing.
It’s called The Dark Night of The Soul. The artist is Philip Wesley. I had no idea the dark night of the soul was so…relaxing.
Some days you get up on the right side of the bed. Some days you get up on the wrong side of the bed. And some days you get up on the surreal side of the bed.
If Trump wins, don’t blame me I voted for… won’t cut it. Don’t blame me I voted for the democrat, I tried to stop him…, is only marginally better. But this is our country, all of us. We are all to blame for what it becomes. In a time like this, it is not enough to wave the flag and strike a pose.
I appreciate how it is that involving yourself in politics can make you feel morally dirty. Perhaps this is why the old time protestant fundamentalists here in America so ostentatiously kept themselves out of worldly matters. But for those of us who care, and who cannot look away at injustice, that is not our destiny. At its best politics is still mostly compromise and consensus and you are presented with choices that you probably don’t like, but can live with, in order to get one small good thing accomplished. At its worst it is a bitter knife fight in the human gutter where you find yourself making decisions and backing choices you desperately didn’t want to make, in order to save ground you know you absolutely cannot afford to lose.
But that is our lot in life. If the fight to make this a better world isn’t making you feel dirty, you are not in the fight.
In 1980, little Libertarian dweeb me voted for Ed Clark. Embarrassment keeps me from naming his running mate. I seriously believed I was helping a new movement which would transform America. We didn’t get Libertarian government (thank goodness), but we did get Ronald Reagan, who kicked off his presidency by breaking the air traffic controller’s union with the help of military air traffic controllers. I was shocked. Nonetheless,I did it again in 1984, voting for Bergland and Lewis. I was dedicated to the cause. I was a useful tool.
My awakening from my Libertarian slumber began in 1986 when Hardwick v. Bowers came down, and nearly all my fellow freedom fighters gave it their hosannas. Freedom it seemed, ended at the state line. That was June. In July of that year came the moment, though I didn’t know it at the time, which I will always regard the climax of Reagan’s presidency: the moment he laughed at Bob Hope’s AIDS joke during the re-dedication of the Statue of Liberty. In a nutshell, that was everything about the Reagan years. I was a useful tool.
Maybe there simply weren’t enough votes for Carter back in 1980, or Mondale in ’84, for those of us who voted third party to have made a difference anyway. But Reagan taught me a lesson about politics, one which the Sage of Baltimore neatly summed up when he said an idealist is someone who, upon noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes it will make a better soup.
I appreciate people have strong feelings about Mrs. Clinton as the democratic candidate. I completely understand how Mr. Sander’s supporters would be feeling angry at how the process went. I’m not exactly thrilled myself. Was the process rigged against him? You can make a strong case that it was. It’s harder though, to make an equally strong case that he’d have won the nomination if the playing field were level, or that he’d be any more likely to win against Trump in the general. You have to make assumptions in each of those cases that are nowhere near as certain as I’m hearing said in some quarters. But okay…I can see the disappointment and anger.
I have policy disagreements with Mrs. Clinton that are deep and profound. All in all I would rather it was Sanders than her. But I am getting really, Really tired of the she’s as bad as he is if not worse claptrap I’m hearing more and more of now…again in certain quarters. There’s a cartoon making the rounds now of a guy holding up a baby and asking another guy to choose between one of two horrible deaths for it, and when the other guy says nether the guy holding the baby says “lesser of two evils man!”
I’m going to be blunt: if you really believe that’s an intellectually honest comparison either you have not been paying attention this past week or you’re insane. It’s one thing to say that on this or that policy issue you cannot be moved, and another to say both these candidates would be equally that destructive to this country and the world at large. That’s not merely stretching a point, it’s claptrap.
I appreciate the moral quandary here. I’m not absolving myself of the moral implications of the choice I am making. But there’s an element of exactly that in the rhetoric I’m hearing now in some quarters. If Trump wins don’t blame me, blame the democrats for not running a better candidate. But it is not that simple. It’s one thing to take a moral position. But morality is not a cocoon. It is not absolution. It’s about choices. And responsibility. We are always to blame. The question is, did we fight the good fight, or just strike a pose. If the fight isn’t getting you dirty, you are not in the fight.
Most third party groups act like the presidency is all there is to government. But look at how the tea party has operated in recent years, regrettably to great success. They go after the local elections, the school boards, the city councils, and from there they have wielded great power, beyond their actual numbers, in the statewide offices. They go after the governorships, and the statehouses. Now they have congress, and enough strength in the Senate to stifle nearly everything president Obama has tried to do.
Where are the Greens? Where are the Libertarians? Beyond a handful of down ticket elections, they’re nowhere. And I can say as someone who collected signatures for the Libertarian candidates in the 70s, they never were. It was always the presidency and then when their candidate predictably lost, back to the media of libertarian magazines, think tanks and discussion groups and bellyache about how horrible Washington was. That is not a political movement, it’s a cult. And that mindset, that aim for the presidency first and foremost, is what keeps voter turnout appallingly low in off year elections. Not a presidential election year? Then who cares anyway. And there, in the elections few Americans pay enough attention to, the extremists have caused enormous damage.
If you can’t vote for Mrs. Clinton because her involvement in the human catastrophe in the middle east is too much, I respect that. But Trump’s rhetoric about keeping us out of foreign wars can’t rationally be regarded as anything more than another one of his empty promises, especially if he delegates policy to Mike Pence the way George Bush delegated to Dick Cheney, and Mrs. Clinton at least is much more trustable with the nuclear codes. But the fact is, she’s more trustable in a broad spectrum of policy issues that have a direct bearing on the lives of everyday people here and abroad. If your intentions are to help improve the lives of the common man and woman, being effective matters. Don’t be mocking all those republican thoughts and prayers every time there is another mass shooting and then vote for someone you know perfectly well cannot win, and allow a thug and his mob to burn everything down, that so many have died for to get us even this far.
Don’t blame me… If ultimately your argument is sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better, then you are not merely accepting that the worst will happen, you are making that it must happen a part of the plan. There’s your blame.
Heart goes out to Münchner and to Germans everywhere.
I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness. -George Fox
Whoever kills an innocent soul, it is as though he killed all mankind. And whoever saves one, it is as though he saved all mankind. -Rumi
We have more questions than answers about why gay rights is a recurring theme on stage in Cleveland this week. Is this a way to try to counter GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s unpopularity among minority groups? Are Republicans trying to expand their base after the Orlando shooting, which targeted the LGBT community? Is this another signal that cultural views about gay rights are shifting in conservative circles? Does this even resonate with an LGBT community that has spent the past year batting down Republican-led policies like a game of whack-a-mole?
What you need to understand about this, about Trump’s claim to be a protector of LGBT lives against Islamic violence and Newt Gingrich’s amen, and the sudden burst of convention talk about LGBT people, is they are not talking to LGBT people. This is not the republican party reaching out, finally, even in a small insignificant rhetorical way, to LGBT people. They said everything they wanted to say to us in the platform.
There’s nothing new about this. They are talking to heterosexuals, who might feel ashamed about voting republican, given the party’s hostility to LGBT people. Perhaps they have LGBT family members, or friends, or co-workers, who they love and respect. Perhaps they just don’t feel comfortable walking with bigots. What all this talk about LGBT people now is for is giving those people an excuse to vote for a man and a party that wants to take away every hard won civil right LGBT people have gained since Lawrence v. Texas. A party that, by its own enthusiastically endorsed platform would put us back into 1950s America of anti-gay witch hunts in government and the military, police raids on gay bars, censorship of gay books and newspapers, arrested for sodomy, or even just for dancing with a same-sex partner in public. On the stage last night, Trump gave them a way to vote for all of this, and still see themselves as decent people.
That’s what this is about. Trump and the republicans are giving them a way to hold onto their self respect, while putting a knife in the back of their LGBT neighbors. He’s giving them a way to look in a mirror and still see themselves as loving the LGBT people in their lives, not someone who sold them out in exchange for a strongman’s promises.
Guest Speaker At The Fascist Gathering…No, Not That One…The Other One…
The group’s founder and Thiel’s host is Hans Hermann-Hoppe, an anarcho-capitalist former professor at the University of Nevada. Hoppe sets the tone for these gatherings. In his book Democracy: The God That Failed, he envisions a stateless “libertarian order” that purges homosexuals and literally anyone who believes in democracy. “They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society,” Hoppe writes, referring to “advocates of parasitism, homosexuality, or communism,” among other undesirables…
And a gay man is his guest. And the GOP’s too, tonight. Arguably billionaire Thiel isn’t desperate for Right Wing welfare dollars.
Bear in mind that, as the article says, Thiel has been waging a proxy lawsuit war against Gawker for outing him. Something you see a lot of in this struggle is the homosexual male who compartmentalizes their sexuality so completely they are barely capable of acknowledging it even in bed. At the low end of the economic scale these are the ones who end up getting caught in vice squad stings, but in the rarefied heights that’s not a worry. And they positively hate the rest of us who settled with our inner nature and are fine with it and willing to do our part to make this a better world for all of us…So Openly.
But there is also this strange, creepy, unsettling place where fascism, which is rule by the strongmen, meets and shakes the hand of libertarianism, which assumes the invisible hand of the marketplace by definition produces morally just outcomes. As they used to say, the struggle is everything: nature rewards the strong, and eradicates the weak. There are many ways of dealing with self-hatred. Almost all of them involve taking it out on someone smaller and weaker.
I see the Roy Cohn branch of the family had its day at the GOP convention the other night…
Headlined by the guy who just got the boot from Twitter for his racist and misogynist attack on Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones, an achievement considering the open sewer Twitter has allowed itself to become, on the same order as being too disgusting even for an S. Clay Wilson comic. He’s also the guy behind the “Gamergate” attacks on women in the gaming community, and Twitter was his useful tool for that one too.
“Growing up gay wasn’t that f**king bad.” he declared from the podium, adding without any apparent irony, “…I still don’t see the reason why the left-wing press mollycoddles and panders to an ideology that wants me dead.” So he’s changed his tune a bit since a year ago when he declared “If I could choose, I wouldn’t be a homosexual.” If I could choose, you wouldn’t be one either guy. Perhaps you and Phil Robertson could have drinks together and ponder which abrahamic religions quote Leviticus with more style.
He was followed by Pam Geller who began with a joke: “A jihadi walks into a gay bar, and the bartender says, ‘What’ll you have?’ The jihadi says, ‘Shots for everyone!’”
Ha ha. And half that convention floor would have helped buy them for him Pam, and the other half would have paid for his defense lawyers. Especially after seeing the artwork on those walls there.
And that artwork…try to look past the fact that they’re all barely, if that, of an age of consent. Photos of comely young guys are just fine by me. Swell even. But I’m a photographer and I can’t avoid seeing these images on another level, and what leaps out at me immediately is the predatory gaze in all of them. These photos aren’t about young male beauty but about young male naivete. The photographer invites you to look upon them not as objects of beauty and desire but as prey. Easy pickings.
Gavin Newsom, former mayor of San Francisco, talks about what he saw at the 2016 Republican National Convention in a video. I’d embed it here but Facebook makes that tactically difficult. But visit the link if you can, it’s worth listening to his passionate disgust at what he saw. And there’s no mistaking it, the republicans, just slightly more than a year after the Supreme Court acknowledged our right to equality in the marriage laws of this land, have written the most homophobic platform in their history. It is a snarling, in your face growl of contempt toward sexual minorities. But then, taken in context with the rest of it…the racism, xenophobia, hatred of women, hatred toward the poor and handicapped, it is of a piece. This is a convention of the human gutter.
Newsome talks mostly about the conversion therapy plank, and you can argue that if any one of the anti-LGBT planks says it all it’s that one. I have a running thread of posts here on this blog about how reparative-conversion-exgay therapy was born in the blood of innocents. That’s not histrionics, it’s a plain statement of fact. The first exgay ministry was Love In Action, founded originally in San Francisco and later relocated to Memphis Tennessee. It’s first three clients included a young man named Jack McIntyre, who killed himself because the stress exgay therapy could only exacerbate within him became too much. That’s not conjecture, he left a suicide note that said in part:
To continually go before God and ask forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life.
What people need to understand is that lethal self loathing is the intention. Not necessarily that it kills, but that it is complete and overwhelming and crippling. It must be a ball and chain on our lives, on our souls. We have to hate ourselves. Because then we are good homosexuals. We hide, we apologise for existing, we don’t expect basic human dignity, let alone assert that our hearts are not there for them to scribble their graffiti on and our lives, our hopes and dreams are not their stepping stones to heaven. We have to bleed, so they can feel righteous.
To call forcing kids into it child abuse is imprecise. It is the rape of the soul. Adults and children alike. And in Cleveland now, these are its advocates. Unsurprisingly, they are also racists, xenophobes and misogynists, grifters, thieves and swindlers, sociopaths and paranoid cowards. Simply put, the human gutter. For generations, we have been dying for their sins because even the blood of Jesus Christ was not enough to get them clean.
The thing you need to understand about conversion/ex-gay therapy is that what’s important isn’t that anyone actually becomes heterosexual. It’s that everyone, gay folk, their families, their neighbors, gets the message that homosexuals are damaged goods at best, abominations in the eyes of god at worst. The scapegoat must always hang their head in shame.
This is telling…
A US navy veteran and now an LGBT activist, he spent four to six months in the group but their tactics began to alarm him. “One of the group leaders prayed and said: ‘I really feel like you have been molested but you’re just suppressing it.’ And I have never been molested in my life. So I would tell them, ‘I’ve never been molested, incorrect.’ And then it turned into a narrative where in order for me to even participate I would have to admit that I had been molested.”
The anti-gay ideology is of a piece. Every thread in it fits neatly together with all the others, like the intricate crackpot conspiracy theories about chemtrails or UFOs. This notion that a person’s homosexuality was caused by childhood molestation walks in lockstep with the notion that since homosexuals don’t reproduce they must recruit or they would die out, and this is why homosexuals are child molesters.
It’s a house of cards. Take away one card and the entire structure begins to fall apart. So this gay man had to have been molested, and as long as he insists he wasn’t, that can only mean he’s still fighting against the truth. Maybe he has a demon inside of him. Maybe he’s just not submitting to the will of god enough. But the possibility that he is a homosexual who wasn’t molested cannot be endured. Because if that could be true, then what else about homosexuality might be true, that we don’t want to know…
Here’s the new Hillary Clinton attack ad on Donald Trump. Basically it’s about how The Donald cheated a trusting small businessman out of his fee for designing and building Trump a nice clubhouse for one of his golf courses..
Is anybody really surprised by this? No, no…not just that it’s Standard Operating Procedure for Trump, not just that the man who could do this to a trusting small businessman is the likely GOP presidential nominee. No. Is anybody really surprised that the GOP grassroots of this day and age in America, really, really love him?
Think about it. They don’t want unskilled service workers to earn a living wage if it means their fast food and WalMart purchases might cost a bit more. They don’t want racial or ethnic minorities, women, gay folk, anyone who isn’t them to have an equal share of the American Dream, but they still want them to do the work of building America. They want their goods and services, but they don’t want to pay a living wage to the people who provide it. They want their job opportunities, but they don’t want their service workers and their kids to have a shot at decent jobs too, because then they might start holding their heads a little higher, and expecting fair treatment. They want their kids to get a good education, but they won’t support the public schools if it means they’re helping the kids from poor families get one too; but they still want those kids to serve them their burgers and pizza and ring up their purchases, preferably for next to nothing.
To call them cheapskates is ennobling. They’re plunderers, just like The Donald, perfectly in tune with the general republican mindset these days, and with the same entitled, grandiose view of themselves Trump and the lot of them have. Of course they like him. They say you take the measure of a nation not in how well it treats its well off, but by how well it treats its poor. Another way of looking at that is, if you’re the sort who would take advantage of someone who is utterly at your mercy, can anyone else really trust you?
Here’s a lesson for all you small business owners who think the republicans are better for business. The man who helps you cheat your employees out of a fair wage, will steal everything from you too and laugh in your surprised face.
Many signs have suggested that the Christian right has largely given up on pushing for ex-gay therapy. From the closing of Exodus International to the Southern Baptist Convention admonishing the harmful, ineffective treatment, it seems that those who reject homosexuality have embraced the idea of celibacy and singlehood instead.
But several news stories from the past week have suggested that many religious conservatives actually still want to see gays and lesbians wind up giving up their sexualities entirely to pursue different-sex marriages with kids.
And just never you mind what this may do to the innocent other halves of these marriage-as-cure marriages. If nothing else, that indifference to the lives of other people, usually heterosexual women, and their hopes and dreams of love and happiness, really shows how deep that sewer they keep mistaking for a conscience runs. Collateral damage, as one right wing terrorist once shrugged off responsibility for the children he killed.
Doug Mainwaring also chimed in Monday, insisting that gay people can happily stay in different-sex marriages — citing himself as an example. “A man who walks away from a marriage because of same-sex attraction is no different from a man who abdicates his role as husband and father for sex with other women,” he scolded. “We shouldn’t view Trey Pearson’s actions as heroically true-to-self, but as simply selfish.”
Mainwaring is the religious right’s current “attack gay”…a gay guy who is happy to shovel his fellow homosexuals into the maw of the religious right’s self hate machine. And also, and indifferently, all that collateral damage. No Doug, a gay man who struggles his way out of the self hatred you need him to live his entire life in so you can feel righteous, isn’t being selfish. If his hopes and dreams of honesty and love need to be your stepping stones to heaven, the selfish greedy blood sucking bastard here is you. If Jesus dying on the cross wasn’t enough to sponge away your cheapshit sins, if other gay people have to die for them too because Jesus on the cross just wasn’t enough, then selfish isn’t even the word for the likes of you. That word would be Predatory.
Once upon a time, one of the first ex-gay clients in the first ex-gay ministry, Love In Action, Jack McIntyre wrote the following just before he killed himself…
To continually go before God and ask forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life.
He killed himself Doug. So he wouldn’t make another promise to god he knew he could not keep. Because the human identity isn’t a blackboard anyone can just scribble their will on. Because he was a homosexual. Because you can’t pray that away anymore than you can pray away being left handed, or blue eyed. There was nothing wrong with him in the first place. The ex-gay movement was born in the blood of innocents. No stream rises higher than its source. He killed himself Doug. So louts like you could be righteous.
You live in the lap of righteous esteem Doug, the useful tool of gutter crawling runts who would rather see a gay man’s heart ripped to shreds, see him end his life, rather than know a single moment of honest love and desire in the arms of another man. The support network you enjoy is built on the ruins of other people’s lives. It is drenched with their blood. And you can’t afford to look can you. So many gay men who end up finding a tree to hang themselves from, or putting a gun to their heads, because louts like you are telling them they’re broken. And be honest here…ultimately, you’re fine with that. Because better they kill themselves than they accept themselves, as in that old Baptist hymn, just as I am.
Because if they can find that honest, truthful happiness…then what does that make you? But you know what you are.
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