The author Mary Renault once said (and I’m paraphrasing now because I don’t have that exact quote) that all politics, like sex, was merely a reflection of the person within, and that if you are mean and selfish and cruel it came out in your sex life and in your politics when what really mattered is you aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that. To that I would only add religion. If you are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your religion too, when what really matters is you aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that…
A provocative new study is challenging assumptions about the deterrent effect of religion on criminal behaviour.
The U.S. study found that through “purposeful distortion or genuine ignorance,” hardcore criminals often co-opt religious doctrine to justify or further their crimes.
Among the interviewees…
A 25-year-old criminal nicknamed “Cool” said he always does a “quick little prayer” before committing a crime in order to “stay cool with Jesus.” As long as you ask for forgiveness, Jesus has to give it to you, he said.
He also suggested that if a crime is committed against another “bad person,” such as a dope dealer or child molester, “then it don’t count against me because it’s like I’m giving punishment to them for Jesus.”
The interviews show that criminals will often employ “elaborate and creative rationalizations” to reconcile their belief in God and their serial offending, the researchers concluded.
As you read this article it isn’t hard to hear in the voices of these criminals every justification the religious right uses to prey on other people. Here is the voice of predatory christianism as if spoken on a minimalist stage. Strip the frippery away and you have a prison gang. How is it that murderers, robbers and thugs don’t see themselves that way? Well, don’t blame religion for it either. Humans have an amazing capacity to see only what we want to see…to lie to ourselves even when it is killing us, rather than admit an uncomfortable truth. Yes, actually…I’m a dick… The religious right uses Christianity the way a thief uses a crowbar. Here in that study, are the professionals.
Notes On The Gay Lifestyle (continued): Message From Another World…
I came out to myself one December evening in 1971, and for the next couple years had no clue whatsoever as to how to find others like me, and maybe get a date, and maybe even find someone who was special enough to settle down with, and build us a life together. Until that moment everything I knew about homosexuals and homosexuality I had learned from heterosexuals, and the opinions there ranged from tactful pity to venomous hostility. In 1971 every state but one had sodomy laws on the books. In 1971 you could be fired, you could lose your professional license, you could loose your home, you could lose your freedom, just for being discovered. Forget about a career anywhere you might need a background check or a security clearance. And the message you got from every direction was you were human filth, a danger to children, a threat to your community, a pathetic faggot at best…
Mad #145, Sept ’71, from “Greeting Cards For The Sexual Revolution” – “To A Gay Liberationist”
…a dangerous sexual psychopath at worst…
“The thought of turning…of turning involuntarily into one of them frightened me…and made me sick with anger.”
You were a symptom of social decay. You were what caused the fall of Rome. You were an abomination in the eyes of God. Certainly you were a thing best left unspoken of in decent company. This was the world I came out into. The only place I knew of where other people like me could be found was a seedy bar downtown that everyone in school joked about. When I searched for books about gay people, fiction that spoke to me about life as a gay man, all I found were trashy sex novels where the gay protagonist was there only to remind everyone what a sad, pathetic life we were all condemned to. To be sure, 60s sexual liberation, at least in theory, extended even to gay people. In the Broadway musical Hair they sang “Sodomy Fellatio Cunnilingus Pederasty. Father, why do these words sound so nasty? Masturbation can be fun. Join the holy orgy Kama Sutra Everyone!” But this was, as always, gay lib as purely sexual in nature…a side show to heterosexual liberation at best. More often, sexual freedom did not include treating gays as anything other than pathetic faggots. Even in the sexually no-holds-barred underground comix world, gay people were stereotypical faggots…
Jake shows the kids how to deal with a limp wrist faggot in Larry Weltz’ “Gearjammer”, Bakersfield Kountry Komics, 1973
If not symptoms of capitalist decadence and oppression…
Guy Colwell reminds us in Inner City Romances #3 (1977), that homosexuality in prison is but a mirror image of capitalist oppression of the strong over the weak…
I had nothing that spoke to me…nothing that spoke to that wonderful, magical experience of first love, and what it taught me was truth; that the love between same-sex couples could be every bit as vital and life affirming as that experienced by opposite-sex couples. Then late in 1972, I stumbled across Mary Renault’s novel, The Persian Boy, and in her works finally, Finally, found what I was looking for…
“Hephaistion had known for many ages that if a god should offer him one gift in all his lifetime, he would choose this. Joy hit him like a lightning-bolt.” —Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven
But my community seemed still so far out of reach. I knew it was out there…somewhere…but I could find no access to it. By the winter of 1972 I was working at a camera store that catered to the professional clientele. I did stock boy duties and one day, while unpacking a shipment of cameras from a distributor in San Francisco, I found a complete issue of The Advocate, placed neatly on top of all the balled up newspaper that was packing the contents of the box. By then I had heard of The Advocate, knew it was a newspaper produced by and for gay people, but I’d had no idea where to find a copy. And now suddenly, there in front of me, was a complete copy, placed there like a message in a bottle by someone in the shipping department at the other end. To whom it may concern…you are not alone… I glanced quickly around…my stockroom manager was elsewhere, I was alone. I took the newspaper and placed it inside my backpack and closed the zipper. When I finally got it home I devoured it like a starving man. I still have it…a carefully saved bit of personal history…
Eventually I found my way to a seedy “adult” bookstore where I could find copies of The Advocate, as well as the local gay paper, The Washington Blade, and several glossy gay magazines that weren’t entirely pornographic, such as Mandate, In Touch and Christopher Street (a gay version of the New Yorker that had hilarious New Yorker style cartoons). That lasted until I discovered the Lambda Rising bookstore downtown at which point it seemed like, finally, the world had opened up to me. But that first copy of Advocate felt at the time like a lifeline, tossed to me by some friendly stranger on the other side of the country. I wish I could thank them.
Notes On The Gay Lifestyle…(continued): That Little Rainbow Sticker That Says “Fire Me”
The pink triangle was sewn on the prison clothes of gay Germans during the thousand year Reich. It was meant to be a stigma, a sign that here was a prisoner who was the lowest of the low. Lambda was the first symbol we embraced for ourselves, as a statement of identity and pride. It was chosen in 1970 by the Gay Activists Alliance of New York, and in 1974 was declared the official international symbol for gay and lesbian rights by the International Gay Rights Congress in Edinburgh, Scotland. It signifies unity under oppression.
I came out to myself on December 15th, 1971 (yes, I remember the exact moment), and as per my nerd genes, instantly began reading everything I could on the subject…which wasn’t much that made any sense since it was nearly all written by heterosexuals. A classmate I was massively crushing on had put an arm around me as we walked together out of school, sending me into a happy rush of delight, tinged with the feel of physical closeness to him. It sent me right into the stratosphere. I spent the rest of that day rushing over and over on the memory of his smile, and the feeling of his embrace. Nothing in my life had ever been so wonderful. That was when I finally had to admit it. Yeah Bruce…you’re gay… And in that moment I knew that everything I had been taught up to then about homosexuals and homosexuality was wrong. So when I read that it was a sickness, I simply discarded it as ignorant. In the Civil Rights/Johnson-Nixon/Vietnam years it wasn’t difficult for a teenager to know that the grownups could be astoundingly stupid.
But that was only a few years after Stonewall, and that first gay pride march in New York City, and even in such an urban place as the Washington D.C. suburbs, a gay teenager was still very isolated from his kind. It was a couple years later before I saw my first issue of The Advocate, which had been carefully added to the packing of a shipment of cameras the store I was working for received from a distributor in San Francisco. I stuffed it into my backpack, squirreled it home and devoured it (I still have it carefully saved away as a bit of personal history). There was a world out there where others like me lived. But finding it closer to home was difficult.
When I discovered, finally the Lambda Rising Bookstore downtown, a world of information and literature opened up before me. And…knickknacks! I bought a little Lambda necklace and wore it constantly. I painted lambdas on my backpacks, so expertly I had people question where I’d managed to buy one with a lambda on it. And I had a little Lambda bumper sticker for my car. Partly it was the joy of being able to identify in a way that the hostile world around me wouldn’t recognize…most of the time. But mostly it was this: a lot of us back then who didn’t live in New York, LA or San Francisco were lost and alone in a world that hated us. I wore the lambda mostly as a little wave of the hand, to anyone who might see it, so to say, Hi…you’re not alone…
Time passes…the universe expands…and one day a newer, better symbol for our struggle emerged. There is a quote…I can’t find it now but I recall it as something like a flag that truly represents its people isn’t decided on by a committee but torn out of them from their lives and their experience. In 1978 Gilbert Baker designed the rainbow flag for that year’s Gay Freedom Celebration in San Francisco. By the time I was a successful contract software developer, it had pretty much completely superseded the Lambda. So where my first car had worn a little Lambda sticker on the back, my first new car since emerging from poverty, the Geo Prism, wore a little rainbow. In the 1990s I was still saying ‘Hi…‘, though it was becoming less and less of a need.
In those days one of my contracts was at a company located in the deep Baltimore suburbs…almost in the sticks. I was doing well as a software developer, not only because I had a mind for it, but also it fit very well to be in a trade where I could go to work in blue jeans and sneakers, and wear my hair long and not get any static from management. The computer geeks of the PC revolution, so unlike the suit and tie IBM mainframe guys, were a notoriously non-conformist bunch. It was even okay to be gay…some of the big names in our field were, and the rest knew perfectly well how to evaluate a statement as true or false. The demonizing crap homophobes spread about us just did not find very good soil amongst the computer nerds. That’s not to say it didn’t occasionally take root here and there all the same.
I had been at the job site about a week, when one day I saw the manager stop abruptly as he passed my car in the company parking lot. I saw him stare at the little rainbow bumper sticker on the back like someone had parked a turd in one of the parking spaces. I went inside and shrugged it off. I wasn’t one of their employees, I was a contractor and we contractors didn’t matter. We did our work and when it was done we went on to the next job somewhere else. That was my life, and in those days I was fine with that. It allowed me to keep office politics and personality conflicts at arm’s length. And as he was managing the company IT division, I assumed he knew from experience that us computer geeks came in a lot of odd varieties. I didn’t think I would get any static about it.
But in less than an hour I was called into his office, along with my contract agency’s lead (there were several of us working that contract there), and told that I was being fired. For…ah…low productivity. I looked him right in the eyes as he said it and I’m sure my expression telegraphed exactly what I was thinking of him then. But I got up, expressed a perfunctory regret that I was not satisfactory and hoped he wouldn’t see that as a reflection on my agency, and my agency rep and I left his office.
As I gathered my things to leave the building, my rep wore a bewildered, somewhat disturbed look. “I don’t get this…” he says, “You’ve only been here a couple weeks and you’ve been doing fine. Nobody expects a new guy to be one-hundred percent in just a couple weeks…but you’ve been doing great…” Then he looks me right in the eyes…I could see his conscience was getting to him…and says, “It really makes you wonder…” All I could say was, “Yeah…I know…”
Getting a little first hand look at discrimination in the workplace are we…?
It was the height of the dot-com boom and I left there confidant I would have work elsewhere, if not the next day then within a week. My agency got me another contract almost immediately and I put it aside. There are some forms of rejection that really get to me and I can’t help it, but those are about my artwork. I have never felt the sting of it when it concerned business, and never, thankfully, when it was over my sexual orientation. I came out to myself one December evening in 1971, and in that wonderful rush of first love I saw the truth, and ever since hate has just rolled off me like water off a duck’s back. I think of my first love, and discard hate as simply ignorant. That was the last job I ever lost when an employer found out I am gay, but it was hardly the only one. And gay people are still very much at risk. But I can think of at least one straight guy out there somewhere, who when he hears that gay Americans don’t need protection from job discrimination, would know from first hand experience exactly why we do. In retrospect that teaching moment was worth getting fired for.
A militant homosexual is a homosexual who doesn’t think there is anything wrong with being a homosexual. A militant homosexual activist is a homosexual who acts like there isn’t anything wrong with being a homosexual.
I had some conservative friends…once. Not social conservatives…so they claimed. No, no…they were all about smoking pot and live and let live…so they said. Oh, they kept voting for crackpot right wing politicians who had no compunction about waging war on deviants Welfare Cadillac Mothers and the Dirty Fucking Hippies. But they frowned on making a big deal out of it. So long as they were left alone to do whatever they damn well pleased. Heinlein kind of conservatives. If you’ve ever read any Heinlein, you know the type.
One day the sister of the family mentioned off-handedly to me that I’d somehow become homosexual because I’d decided that all women were bitches. I tried to tell her as politely as I could that my sexual orientation wasn’t a matter of rejection of one sex, as my attraction to my own. Desire I said, wasn’t disdain by a different name. I was drawn to males, not repulsed by females. I Liked women. Just not that way. I don’t think she ever got that. Point of fact, I said, when I figured myself out in my teen years, I was able to relate more comfortably to women. The pressure to date against my nature was very disturbing. It made me angry and frustrated. I hated the whole thing. Then I finally came to a place where I could acknowledge that I was a homosexual, that I liked guys and that was okay, and the pressure was off and I could relax. It took a very great weight off my shoulders. But that didn’t seem to compute with her. Or any of them.
One day while pontificating about gay activists…I forget now what the specific issue of the day was…she averred that I was better than them because I was a “discrete” homosexual. I laughed, and told her I wasn’t discrete, I was Single. It’s easy to be discrete about your love life I said, when you don’t have one. I don’t think she ever got that either.
Time passes…the universe expands…and a bunch of people who only knew me casually found out what a militant homosexual I apparently was when my web site, and Facebook, made it possible for them to see my writings about my concerns social and political. And what I saw was it came as a shock to some that I really didn’t think there was anything wrong with me. That I would actually vote and act and behave like Those Other People, that I really believed I deserved the same chances for love and happiness and contentment as everyone else. It felt as though I were being called a traitor somehow. Oh…you were one of Those people all along…
Yes. I was. I am a human being. I have the same needs as any of you. Couldn’t you see that?
I wear my hair long. I’ve done this since I was a teenager. I like the look of it on me, and I have a thing for longhaired males. Admittedly it’s high maintenance compared to wearing it short, but it’s worth it to me. So much so in fact, that I’ve declined jobs rather than accede to an employer’s demand that I cut it. Of course, a lot of those were probably more about a suspicion of homosexuality than the length of my hair. Saying I was being fired for a dress code offense after I’d already been employed with long locks suggested there was something else going on.
As I said, I have a thing for longhaired males. And back in my twenties I was delighted to find that even as the clone look was becoming fashionable among gay guys, lots of gay guys still liked the look of a guy with long hair. One day, one of these pinged me on a gay BBS I did volunteer work for, and asked me into one of the private online chat rooms.
He said he’d seen my profile (the sysop had created a message board just for the posting of profiles). This was back in a time when everything you did online you did in a text only terminal. I think the sysop still hadn’t decided what to do about attaching photos to the profiles. Storage space was pretty expensive back then, and download times on a dial-up modem connection were not wonderful. So the profiles had no photos. Mine was correct as far as the specs went…my age, my height and weight…I’ve never seen the point of lying about any of that. But all he knew about me was that, and that I wore my hair long. And right away as I enter private chat mode, he’s telling me how hot he got reading my profile.
I’ve never thought of myself as ugly, but I’ve been called that more than a few times (“people who look like that, want people who look like that…”). But I’ve also had complements too, and when I look in the mirror, I generally like what I see. Yes…I would hit that. But by my mid thirties, still hopelessly single, I pretty much knew my face and my skinny as a rail body were not supermodel material. Okay…fine. I don’t need the world to think I’m good looking…just one special someone if I can just find them.
So I start telling this guy to calm down a bit, because he hasn’t actually seen me. It was really like that because everything he was typing at me in private chat mode is about how hot it is making him just talking there online to a longhaired gay guy. Take a chill pill man…I might be your type or I might not be. The sysop was throwing a BBS party the following week, how about we meet then?
And I figure he just about has an orgasm then….YES! YES! YES! WE HAVE TO GET TOGETHER THEN!!!! And before he signs off he’s bubbling over about how hot long haired gay guys are.
So (you can see this coming…right?) I go to the party, chat with everyone there that I already know, and this guy whoever he was does not come up to greet me. Later I learn that he was there, took one look, and kept his distance. Hahahahahaha…
Later that summer, the sysop organized a picnic for all of us at a nice city park and I was introduced to Mr. Longhairs Are So Fucking Hot. I’d hitched a ride with one of the other users, who asked me ahead of time if I could find a ride home since he had to go to work right after the picnic. I figured I could and wouldn’t you know, Mr. Longhairs Are So Fucking Hot offered me one. Several other users offered me rides after that and I declined saying Mr. Longhairs Are So Fucking Hot was taking me home. As the picnic wound down and my other offers were already gone, Mr. Longhairs Are So Fucking Hot comes back and says he has a date for that night, could I get a ride from someone else. I think I eventually walked to the closest Metro station, which was a couple miles away.
It wasn’t often some guy I thought was drop dead good looking and sexy asked me out on a date, but that happened one day when a fellow user of a gay BBS I did volunteer work for sent me an email complementing me on some posts I’d made and calling me “intense”. I was happily taken by surprise. At the end of that email, he asked if we could meet up.
I figured it wasn’t going to go well when the first thing he told me when we met at the Dupont Circle Metro, was how much he hated my sunglasses…
Back in the BBS days, the 1990s, before the Internet was opened up to commercial use, I joined a small gay community BBS system and eventually became one of its volunteer support staff. It grew from a single line, single connection at a time system to a multi-line multi-user system, and with that, came the first chat channels I’d ever been exposed to. Gay chat channels.
But this was not a meat market sort of gay BBS…its sysop swore if it ever became that he’d pull the plug on it. He wanted it to be an information resource for the local gay community and to its final hours when the Internet finally killed the BBSs, that was what it was. Even so, you had to expect there would be lots of gay singles there, lonely hearts, mostly computer geeks, looking for something better than the bar scene. Or at least quicker.
I hated the bar scene…just never fit into it…and I joined that BBS specifically to meet people in what I hoped was a nicer environment, and hopefully find a boyfriend. So with the new “chat rooms” came new opportunities for private conversations with whoever else was logged in, and one day, I think I was reading my mail, I got a ping from another user on a different line to have a private chat. Sure, says I, and I entered chat mode.
He asks me if I live in the city. No says I, I live in the suburbs. He asks a few other things, I forget what now, and then he asks me, “What are you into?” So I reply that I like cartooning and photography, and writing software and I tell him about the work I did for that BBS, and the local newspapers I did photography for. I tell him about my work building architectural models and how it tweaked my skills as a draftsman and painter…after a while I noticed he wasn’t responding. Then I saw he’d logged off.
I sat there puzzling it over for a while, wondering if maybe he’d just been disconnected somehow. That happened a lot back in the dial-up modem days. But eventually I figured it out.
I’m seeing this other hashtag flying across my Twitter feed… #whitehistoryclasses…and it puts me in mind of a story I’ve been meaning to tell for a long time in this space. Charitably, when some of us white folk assert there is no systematic racism in this country because all the No Coloreds signs have been taken down, we are being merely clueless. There is more to it than that. I know from personal experience, and I strongly suspect most of us white folk know it too…or would if we wanted to. Gather round the campfire boys and girls, and I’ll relate a little White History for you. A piece of mine anyway.
It was the late 1970s, and I was in my twenties and desperate for work. But I had a reliable car, a little Ford Pinto sedan that was bought and paid for…bought with so few options (it literally didn’t even have a cigarette lighter, although the wiring for one was there in the dashboard) it was easy to work on myself, and über reliable. And I loved to drive it. So one avenue I kept looking at in the Help Wanteds were all the ads for couriers. If I could combine my love of driving with a job that required me to drive places would be ideal…or so I thought.
Problem was, all those ads listed detailed knowledge of the roads in downtown Washington D.C. as a requirement, and not only did I not know downtown all that well, I absolutely hated driving there. Traffic was a horrible and parking was a nightmare all day long. So I kept looking hopefully for a listing from a service that needed someone to work the suburbs instead. And lo and behold, one day I saw one. Must know Montgomery County Roads…said the ad. Well…I was their man!
So I darted out to the address on the ad, supremely confidant that I would ace whatever test they threw at me. Hello…says I. I’m your man. I’ve lived here practically my entire life. I know Montgomery County roads like I laid the asphalt myself. Well…says the owner of the courier service, an elderly man who from the look of him could have retired decades ago…we need to test that for ourselves. And they put me in a small room and gave me a sheet of questions. Describe how, exactly, you would you get from point A to point B. This is going to be a piece of cake thinks I as I sat down.
But the first question asked about a route in downtown Washington D.C. And…I couldn’t answer it. So I skipped to the next question on the test which was…another question about directions in downtown Washington D.C.. And so was the next. And the next. They were all questions about downtown Washington D.C..
So I took the test back to the owner and told him I was sorry, but I could not answer any of it. No worry, says he. We’ll put a radio in your car, you will get your jobs from the dispatcher and if you get lost you can call for directions. I needed the work, so I said well…okay…I can do that. But…why did you write your ad as through you were looking for people to work in Montgomery County?
And I swear to god he patted my knee like he was my grandfather and said, “Oh, we wrote it that way so we won’t get any of them colored boys out here looking for work.”
Well…god forbid us white kids from the suburbs would have to compete with them colored boys from the city who probably know their streets like the backs of their hands.
So I hemmed and hawed and said I really didn’t want to drive in the city…but if you ever need someone to work out in the county give me a call…and I darted out of there. I felt dirty in a way I hadn’t since I stood in a line of about twenty or so other guys and bent over and spread them for my pre-induction physical. Later I sent in an anonymous letter to the county telling them about the ad and the service…but I didn’t actually call the man a racist to his face and walk out on him either. I just didn’t have that kind of nerve back then.
No, I don’t know what it’s like to be a black guy in America. But I know what it’s like to be a white guy. And I know exactly how much was stacked in my favor. Every one of us does. Or could, if we really wanted to face facts.
That Pleasure You Feel While Victimizing Others That You Keep Mistaking For A Sense Of Humor
The thing sociopaths never get is the difference between laughing at the powerful and laughing at the oppressed. Apparently some Colorado state representative spoke up recently in favor of a bill banning the carrying of guns on college campuses. Now I happen to think that’s a perfectly reasonable position for everyone, gun owners and second amendment believers like myself to take. I also understand perfectly that the likes of the NRA and other Kultur Krieger would howl bloody murder over it for reasons that have essentially nothing to do with the ability of people to defend themselves from violence.
To the extent that any argument is being made here, it’s that guns in the hands of women can prevent rape, therefore banning guns from college campuses makes rape more likely to happen to young women, therefore if you believe in banning guns on college campuses you must think rape isn’t so bad really. The level of cheap bar stool demagoguery here is breathtaking. But wait…there’s more…
Naturally the right wing noise machine kicks into gear and tries to make this Colorado state representative into some kind of liberal Todd Akin. The problem with doing that when you never saw anything wrong with Akin’s crack about legitimate rape in the first place completely escapes them…
There’s this new hashtag #LiberalTips2AvoidRape that’s now on its second day of trending on Twitter: A really, really great expression of our shared humanity, and of the possibilities of feel-good, thoughtful conservative satire… this is not…
Satire, as every political cartoonist knows, is a powerful weapon against the brutal and the ignorant. And never more so than when the brutal and ignorant try wielding it themselves. It’s like one of those magical swords in fantasy stories that turns on its unworthy bearer. Behold…
If you have the stomach for a torrent of rape jokes you should go browse that hashtag on Twitter. Pay attention to what’s going on here. This isn’t about guns. This isn’t about the second amendment. This isn’t about the ability of people to defend themselves from violence…
The ability of the common man and woman, and particularly of the weak and vulnerable, to be secure in their homes and their streets, to defend themselves from violence, is an eminently liberal concern. That is not what the reactionary right is about. They vigorously thump for their own right to self determination and self defense and sneer when the powerless and outcast assert those same rights. This is about culture war. Nothing else.
Here’s how some liberals are responding to the hashtag…
That’s the right approach. And in that spirit I have some of my own.
#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Focus on putting violent offenders in jail, not pot smokers
#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Remove judges that think women provoke rape by dressing slutty and walking alone
#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Teach boys their manhood does not depend on their ability to dominate women
#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Prosecute those who protect rapists from the law, even if they happen to be Catholic priests or the Pope
#LiberalTips2AvoidRape: Fire any politician who even utters the words “transvaginal probe” in the context of an abortion bill.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” -Inigo Montoya, “The Princess Bride”
Here’s another word people keep using: Homosexual.
So I’m seeing the chatter about how this new Gallup poll (you know…the folks who did so well predicting the outcome of the last election…), gives us a more accurate figure for the percentage of gay people in America than Kinsey’s ten percent, and I can only conclude they aren’t paying attention to what they’re reading, don’t understand where that ten percent figure came from and/or what the Kinsey scale actually was.
Kinsey’s scale of zero through six, where zero (exclusively heterosexual) and six (exclusively homosexual) described the sexual behavior of his subjects over the previous three years of their lives, based on extensive face to face interviews with them. The report stated that ten percent of American males were “more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55” by grouping the percentages of the five (Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual) and six positions on the scale together to come up with that ten percent figure. Later gay rights activists used this to claim that ten percent of the population is homosexual.
That’s an arguable, but perfectly defensible claim based on Kinsey’s data which, again, came from subjects who were only asked about their actual sexual behavior for the previous three years. But it is measuring a different thing than Gallup asked, which was…
“Do you, personally, identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender?”
See the difference? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
The problem has always been the percentage of people who are homosexual you get in any given study depends on how the people who did the study define what “homosexual” is. It seems so clear cut and obvious on the surface of it and yet different people, even in all intellectual honesty about it, have different definitions…let alone those who want to marginalize us when it’s convenient (their numbers are too small for society to cater to their whims), and exaggerate our numbers when convenient (nearly all child molesters are homosexuals…it’s how they perpetuate themselves since they can’t reproduce…).
At this stage in my life, after all I’ve seen of this world, I am still comfortable with that ten percent figure. But I’m calling it desire, not necessarily how someone behaves or how they self identify. I Know people, and so do many of us who are gay, who would fit comfortably in either that Kinsey five or six position and yet would nonetheless have assured Gallup that they were heterosexual. It’s called “The Closet” and a lot of people are still in it….some still in denial, some not. In my generation and earlier especially, you see a lot of gay men who married young, as a way of turning themselves straight. Some of these have remained in those marriages, living behind that mask still, after all that has passed by them in the struggle, and I can’t find it in my heart to blame them for that. They love their wives very much. Add to that those of us who are out in various stages, even out to everyone they know and work with, and who would be unwilling to answer that question from a stranger.
I still think ten percent is probably right. But even those of us who are militantly out and proud don’t always seem so to the passing stranger. There is no gay lifestyle. You likely won’t know unless you are close enough to a person to know, and even then you might not. And still, even today, many people simply don’t want to know it about themselves. It does not surprise me either that perhaps only three to four percent rather than ten are willing to live openly just as they are, and fight the fight for our human dignity that still needs fighting.
“Do you, personally, identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender”, is a question worth asking of course, and maybe someday better researchers than the louts at Gallup will ask that question. But it’s really not the point. The word does not mean that.
Came down a few moments ago to find the washing machine had not spun my load of shirts and wouldn’t open the door (it’s a front loader). Crap, thinks I…considering I might have to call for service and wondering how much of a bite that’ll take out of this month’s income. I try a spin only cycle to see if that would jar it out of its state. It rinses the load but the drum never moves.
Crap. Crap. Crap…
I have loved this new washer…an Electrolux. It is the most amazingly water efficient thing I have ever seen. No matter what sort of load I put in it the washer only uses just enough water to get everything nice and soaked, but there is never any excess I can see in the drum. The clothes are just there in the drum, completely wet, but not actually tumbling in any water at the bottom of the drum. It’s amazing to me.
And that of course, is because it’s completely computerized. And I make my living in the IT world. So what naturally comes to mind is…I go up upstairs, get the owners manual, go back downstairs to the washer and try unplugging it…waiting for a bit…and plugging it back in. This allows me to get the door to unlock and I get my unspun and still soggy shirts out. I close the door again, open the manual to the Installation Diagnostics page and make the washer go through its installation diagnostics. I figure if nothing else at least I’ll have something, possibly some error code to tell the service folks when I call them.
But the washer goes through its diagnostics just fine, during which it fills and drains and the drum goes through all its movements like it’s supposed to. At the end the display gives the washer a Passed All Tests. So I put the unspun shirts back in, close the door and give it a Spin Only cycle, which also does a brief rinse. Works like it’s supposed to. Shirts are in the dryer now.
The poor dear had gotten confused somehow, and powering it down and back up cleared the problem. I rebooted my washing machine, in other words. Or in further words, I now own a washing machine that may need the occasional reboot. Well…but I learned to live with that when I got the new furnace A computerized furnace. But it measures the temperatures inside and outside of the house and can adjust the blower speed on a minutely variable scale as needed. It builds up an internal history of how the house responds to outside changes in temperature and anticipates what is needed to maintain the temperature inside. It’s lowered my energy bills considerably. I’ve rebooted it a bunch of times since I had it installed six years ago.
I’m sure glad my life took me down the Earning A Living In IT route. I have No idea what people my age who have little to no experience diagnosing computer/software problems must be thinking when one of their new microchip controlled appliances starts acting funny, but I suspect it’s something like panic.
The winner of our contest surmounted incredible odds to beat their rivals for the crown. Or perhaps stabbed a few of them in the back…who knows. All’s fair in Love and War, two things so very different from one another, yet so similar in the wreckage they leave behind.
But we’re not done yet. Further bitter, yet still ridiculously hopeful reflections on our pre-game celebration are yet to come. So put that bottle of sleeping pills back in the medicine cabinet and tune in tomorrow!
The Sixth Annual Casa del Garrett Valentine’s Day Poster Contest…(Part 2!)
Here is our last batch of this year’s worthy entries, each of whom might have made the cut were it not for the fact that their best simply wasn’t good enough. Their prize in the days, weeks and years of sleepless nights to come will be knowing that, and our special Valentine’s Day sympathy card printed on recycled paper.
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