Lifted from Peterson’s comment to his own blog post Here…

Peterson now wants to help others that are referred to the clutches of Exodus. He invited all ex-gay survivors, as they call themselves, to a conference in opposition to the ex-gay movement. They can learn how one can be gay and nevertheless lead a godly life. Michael Bussee co-founded Exodus 30 years ago but came back out of it because he found the methods of the organization questionable. Today he participates in the ‘counter’-conference: “One day a young man came to me. He explained that he’d had anonymous sex and felt so guilty afterward that he mutilated himself. At that point I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t preach against homosexuality anymore if it causes such damage.”

Emphasis mine.   You folks who say "love the sinner, hate the sin"…?  There’s your love.

I might have actually done something like this…

This touching little video is from a TV commercial for the Norwegian Lesbian and Gay Rights movement (LLH). The text at the end, according to one commenter on YouTube (who presumably reads Norwegian) says “You don’t have to be THAT brave.” The number is for a information hotline for gay youth.

And before you ask…I did a lot of digging around for the background song on this. Apparently a lot of other people besides me would love to have a copy of it. But don’t go looking around on iTunes because it’s not there, or anywhere else. It was recorded especially for this PSA, and so for as I can determine, has not ever been released for purchase by the general public. Here are the lyrics…

Were dancing you and me its our destiny
Baby you and me
Make up your mind
Like I told you a 1000 times
Everything will be just fine
If I can’t see you tonight
I know my love will grow stronger

(chorus)
I’ll be dreaming of you
Like everything is bright and blue
And I’ll be here waiting
But not for so long (so long)

If I could have one song for my comic series A Coming Out Story, this would be it. I doesn’t become an obvious match though, until the last half of the series, and I’m only still in the beginning of the first half.

Historically and linguistically, being left-handed has long been associated with the mark of the devil. In Latin, the word "sinister" means "left." In French, it is "gauche" – a far worse sin in France than being sinister, no doubt.

There is the left-handed compliment, which is no compliment at all; the bad guy was made to sit at the left hand of God; and there has been a higher than average number of left-handed, insane villains like Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler.

-Beth Quinn – Good News From The Left-Handed Liberation Front

Sin.  Sinister.  Left-Handed.  We don’t have to imagine a religion that regards left handedness as a mark of the devil, because it existed.  Perhaps in some corners of the human world, it still exists.  And some of us of my generation don’t have to imagine what reparative therapy for left-handedness would look like, because we have seen it with our own eyes.

The myths and superstitions surrounding left handedness were almost completely dead, at least in the United States, when I entered grade school back in 1959.  But they hadn’t died out completely.  I’m old enough to remember watching two teachers tie a classmate’s left arm to his side after he was caught writing something with his left hand. 

They did it at the kid’s parent’s request, and they were not brutal about it.  It wasn’t like they were binding him tightly or anything.  The thinking was that if you just train a kid to use their right hand early enough, it would take and they wouldn’t be left handed anymore.  It was a bit like putting something bitter on the thumb of a small child that won’t stop sucking their thumb.  They just lightly tied a small strap around the kid’s waste and left arm, to prevent him from reflexively using his left hand to write with.  The kid did not resist, he just sat there crying, humiliated, because he knew he’d done something wrong.

Except…he hadn’t.  Put aside for a moment that their model of how handedness works was all wrong.  That it was something like a bad habit which, if caught early enough, you could correct.  Even if handedness was a completely chosen thing, there is nothing wrong or evil or harmful about using your left hand over your right.  Unless that is, you believe that it’s a sin.  Left-handed.  Sinister.  Sin.  Or you believed the few remaining mental health professionals of the day who said  that left-handedness leads to a host of mental and psychological problems.  Didn’t you know that a higher then average number of serial killers are left handed? 

It isn’t hard to picture how an ex-leftie ministry might work to suck the pride and joy and love of life out of a young guy, a kid maybe who keeps having these…urges…to use their left hand.  Every time he gets that urge he believes he is being unfaithful to God.  He believes this, because his church is telling him this.  The Devil baptizes his followers with his left hand…  His peers either ridicule him, or bath him in suffocating patronization.  He has this…condition.  He can’t help himself.  There is something tragically wrong with him.  His parents are profoundly ashamed that their son uses his left hand.  The kid is deeply ashamed of himself.  And every time he feels the urge to use his left hand, the shame deepens.

But there is one final hope.  Reparative therapy.  Thousands have found freedom from left-handedness.  Question left-handedness.  There are stories of hope and redemption.  This one has been living as a right handed man for over a decade, and is now a successful painter who, he says, never feels the urge to use his left hand to pick up a brush.  That one has been in a successful relationship with another ex-leftie and they are raising a healthy, godly family of right handed children.  This one has been freed from left-handedness through the power of faith.  That one abandoned the left-handed lifestyle, and all its self destructiveness, the drugs, the booze, the litany of health problems, and has been living a clean and sober life ever since.

So he checks himself in for a round of ex-leftie therapy.  Perhaps he misses the fine print on the form that says he will never be completely cured of this left-handed urges.  Perhaps it is not in the fine print.  Perhaps, full of all the stories of hope and cure and…redemption…he decides not to notice. 

So he spends months…then years…and thousands of dollars in the ex-leftie world.  He abandons school, career, the life he had, the life he could have had, on his quest to rid himself of his urge to use his left hand.  But he can’t.  He’s left handed.  After a long struggle he eventually becomes adept at using his right hand to do simple chores.  He can write…sort of.  An accomplishment he’s proud of.  Now he can write with a fountain pen and not smear the ink.  He can use scissors with his right hand.  He can pitch a ball with his right hand…sort of.   But the urges never go away, and maddeningly after years of adapting to a right handed life, he…falls…again and again. 

Sometimes its unexpected, like when his neighbor’s kid playfully tosses a ball at him and he catches it in his left hand.  Sometimes it happens when he lets his guard down, and he catches himself doodling something with the pen in his left land.  It seems the devil won’t let go of him.  But it’s not the devil.  It’s just his biology.  The model of handedness he’s been fed is all wrong, and no amount of sincerely held religious belief can change that any more then it could change the fact hundreds of years ago, that Galileo and Copernicus were right.  And yet, it moves. 

All his life this left handed man has been fighting his nature.  And…for what?  To please a lot of right handed people who have bought into, for whatever reason, a model of handedness that is not true, and which…surely only coincidentally…elevates them above their left handed neighbors.  His own nature has been used against him since childhood, to implant shame, self loathing, disgust.  To make him accept his lowly status.  He has been denied a wholesome and nurturing spiritual life, being made to feel himself alienated from God Every Time He Gets An Urge To Use His Left Hand.  Which he keeps getting, Because He’s Left Handed.

He is either condemned, or at best, patronizingly offered help for his…condition.  When he is not being told that his sin is the worst sin of all, he’s being patronizingly told that well…we’re all sinners in the eyes of the Lord.  But this sin seems woven into his very being, like a taint on his very soul.  He just can’t stop the urges.  His body fights him every time he picks up a pencil or pen.  It reminds him constantly that, somehow, he is fundamentally wicked, in a way no one else seems to be.  No one else except other devil marked lefties.  

He has been denied wholesome and nurturing relationships with his peers, with his community, with his family, because every time he catches himself using his left hand for something, or even feeling the urge to, he is ashamed, and so he withdraws, feeling ashamed, unclean, unworthy. He has been denied the career he might have had, the friends he might have made, and all the joy and fulfillment they might have brought. 

Who knows…perhaps he was even denied the love of his life, because he was taught from such an early age, that there was something innately unclean about him.  A feeling of shame and despair that was reenforced, again and again within him, every time he had that perfectly natural urge to use his left hand.  Sin.  Sinister.  Left-handed. 

The devil baptizes his own with his left hand…  He sees himself as someone profoundly, horribly tainted.  Unworthy.  He gets on his knees nightly and begs God, tearfully, to take the urges away from him.  But they don’t go away.  He’s Left Handed.  It isn’t something you can pray away. 

He pays therapists thousands of dollars to talk him into being right handed.  Perhaps it was an overly dominant mother.  Perhaps when a boy uses his left hand to write with, he is subconsciously rebelling against his manhood.  Left is associated with the feminine isn’t it?  Whereas right is associated with the masculine.   Perhaps his father was too distant.  Perhaps he isn’t getting enough masculine activity.  But therapy doesn’t work either.  He’s Left Handed.  You can’t psychoanalyze it away.  It wasn’t his mother.  It wasn’t his father.  It’s his biology.  It’s perfectly normal.  Not average.  Not common.  But nonetheless, normal.

But he is never told that.  There are nights when he wonders why God even allowed him to be born.

There is nothing wrong with him.  Nothing.  He’s just left-handed.  It neither harms him, nor his neighbors, that he uses his left hand.   And it doesn’t separate him from God, because if God is the creator then God made him that way.  If anything, it is trying not to be what he so clearly is, that is separating him from God.  It is also separating him from his family, and from his community.  It has separated him from the whole life he could have had.

Reality matters.  Existence exists.  When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird.  You would think that someone of a deeply religious nature, wishing to be faithful and devoted to God almighty would instinctively grasp how the hand of the creator has the final, absolute say over all our human pretensions.  However we might wish reality to be, reality is what it is.  There is a lesson on standing humbly before the Creator in that, which you’d think the religious conservative would find completely agreeable.  You’d think.  But if that were so, then there wouldn’t be a movement to teach creationism to school kids, let alone a movement to teach homosexuals to hate themselves, and to teach their peers, their neighbors, their country, to treat them with contempt.  The problem with standing humbly before the creator, is that its…well…humbling. 

I have this love/hate relationship to the books of Robert Heinlein.  When he’s good he’s pure gold.  But there are times he makes me want to hit the roof.  And I suppose he’d be delighted to hear this.  He always said he wanted first to make a living as a writer, second to be entertaining, and third, to make you think.

Anyway…there’s this passage in Stranger In A Strange Land which I could forgive Heinlein anything for writing.  It’s the scene where Jubal Harshaw introduces a friend to Anne, who is a "fair witness".  I’m doing this from memory here, but as I recall it, Jubal and his friend are by the pool with some others, and the friend remarks that he’d never met a fair witness before and Jubal says of course you have, Anne is one.  Oh really, asks the friend.  And Jubal calls over the Anne "Anne, what color is that house on the hill over there?"  And Anne takes a look and immediately replies, "The side that’s facing me is white." 

That’s not only a beautiful illustration of what it means to tell the truth, but also how telling the truth has to work in the human context.  We are not gods.  We do not have the god’s eye view of reality.  So we have to be careful to understand, really understand, what it is that we know, and what it is that we don’t.

I’ve heard religious fundamentalists say that the most important question facing us is where will we spend eternity.  No.  There is another question that is more important then that one, more important then any other question you can ask.  Because it’s the question you have to know the answer to, before you can answer any other question:  What do I know, and how do I know it?

I suppose a fundamentalist would reply with some form of "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it."  But that’s still not answering the question.  How do we know that the Bible is an authoritative source?  How do we know what the Bible says?  At some point, we all have to make judgments, and those judgments are always personal.  It helps to make them honestly and sincerely.  But it also helps to do that with a little humility.  You only know the side that’s facing you.  And it goes without saying, that its helpful not to misrepresent the facts that we do know, to kind of…nudge people…in the right direction.  For their own good.

We should always behave such that what is true, can be verified to be so. -Jacob Bronowski.

But that’s been something of a problem for the ex-gay world, hasn’t it?

So I’m reading the back and forth between the ex-gay blogs and the survivor’s blogs in the wake of the Survivor’s Conference.  Seems the very word ‘Survivor’ is controversial.  One writer in the comments on Peterson’s blog says that using the term survivor is provocative.  As provocative as a million dollar billboard campaign designed to make people think that their homosexual neighbors’ most intimate sense of self is something akin to a blackboard that they could just wipe clean and redo for the pleasure of their heterosexual neighbors whenever they wanted to, if they weren’t so selfish, or so…trapped…in homosexuality…I’m not so sure.  How would a heterosexual be expected to feel upon laying eyes on a billboard that featured a handsome, happy gay man asking them to "Question Heterosexuality"?  Ah…but it’s not provocative to assert that there is no such thing as a homosexual…only people trapped in homosexuality. 

An anonymous ex-gay blogger asks if the ex-ex-gays are survivors, does that mean she’s a mortally wounded victim, or a corpse, or a zombie.  Well let me just answer as a gay man, who keeps hearing homophobic jackasses bellyaching about how we stole the word ‘gay’ away from decent society, that what other people call themselves doesn’t make you anything.  As a gay man who has heard himself labeled a symptom of social decay, if not a walking signpost of impending Armageddon, ever since he was a teenager, let me say that how other people live their lives doesn’t make You anything.  As a gay man who has walked among my fellow gay folk in many places and many scenes, from the sublime to the ridiculous, let me say that even when other people assert their identity with you, in ways you may find completely nonsensical if not utterly bewildering, That does not make you anything.  It’s your own experience in this life that makes you something.  It’s the fact that you lived it, or are still living it, that gives you the right to name it. 

But of course, this isn’t about what people call themselves, it’s about what they call others.  And I can appreciate how the ex-gay movement can take the use of the word ‘survivor’ in this context as an attack, considering that the religious right has made an art out of applying labels to themselves, as a way of back handedly pasting labels onto others.  So they say they’re pro-life, as a way of saying the other side is pro-death.  So they say they’re pro-family, as a way of saying the other side is anti-family.  So they say many thousands have found freedom from homosexuality, as a way of saying that homosexuality is a prison, or an addiction.  But that’s not what’s going on here, and if the word ‘survivor’ has any meaning, then just reading the stories on Beyond Ex-Gay is all that’s necessary to see how the word applies to these people. 

Of course, those stories are pretty damming, whether the survivors intend that or not.  Mortally wounded?  How about, Part Of The Problem.  A name on the knife in someone’s heart?  Someone you may have never even laid eyes on.  Perhaps some helpless teenager.  Delivered with love.  Yes, it would be nice if we could all just get along, regardless of what we call ourselves.  Yes, it would be wonderful, peaceful, happy tranquility if we could all just live our fucking lives, find our happiness in this life, make our way for ourselves in this world, reach for the dream within our hearts, to the best of our ability, to the best within us.  But that’s, let’s face it, just not in the cards.  Righteousness forbids it. 

The answer to how we all manage to get along despite our differences, is simple, in the way all impossible answers are simple.  You let leave us alone and let us live our lives, and we leave you alone and let you live yours.  But that is just not to be.  You are called to save us from ourselves, because you have the ultimate truth, and we are all merely trapped in sin, and never mind that you only see the side of the house that’s facing you.  Salvation has given you the God’s eye view.  So you’ll keep twisting that knife marked Salvation into people’s hearts and those of us trying to find and have and hold that someone to love in this poor, angry world, that intimate other, that soul mate, or as you might say, Trapped In Homosexuality will keep trying to get you The Fuck Off Our Backs, even if that means we have to be rude about it.  Because, you are taking what should be one of our life’s most perfect joys, and making it your offering to God and our hearts are not yours to offer.

I was content to ignore the ex-gay movement until the day I watched it try to drive a knife into the heart of a gay teenager who was perfectly content with who he was.   And then I took a closer look at what was being done to many other innocent hearts in the name of God, and even more obscenely…in the name of Love.  Most of them adults, some of them just kids.  I listened to one gay teenager talk about being forced through Love In Action against his will, and then how his own mother beat the living crap out of him because he was still as gay when he came out as when he went in, because the religious right had taught her to loath her own flesh and blood, and the ex-gay movement taught her that he didn’t have to be gay if he didn’t want to be, that his sexuality was an addiction, a false image, a renunciation of manhood, proof that she was not a good mother, and I don’t think the day will ever come when remembering his words and the look on his face as he told the story of the day his own mother started pounding her fists into him won’t make me want to put my fist through a wall.  It could make a stone cry.  But not the righteous.

So…I’m all about dialogue.  Considerate and transparent dialogue is a Good Thing.  But it’s a bit like dialogue between Israel and the Arab states surrounding it:  A prerequisite to talks is that you recognize my right to exist.  And see…that’s the problem.  Because there is just no way I can ask you to do that, ask you to get off our backs, ask you let us live in our communities, in our country, as full and equal citizens, no way I can even suggest it, that you will not hear me demanding of you that you renounce your faith.  We have to bleed, so you can be righteous.

So…maybe instead of calling ourselves gay, or ex-ex-gay, we all should just cut to the bottom line, and call ourselves Scapegoats.

While on the road from Laramie, I tuned into Sirius OutQ and heard that John Edwards wife had made a speech about the need for hate crime legislation…

Edwards’ wife says local homicide illustrates danger of hate speech

Elizabeth Edwards said Saturday she is troubled by the suspected anti-gay beating death of a Sacramento man, and said the killing of Satender Singh demands renewed condemnations of hate speech in America.

Singh, a 26-year-old Fijian immigrant, died four days after he was attacked July 1 at Lake Natoma by an angry group hurling explicit gay slurs and racial remarks.

Edwards, campaigning in Sacramento for her husband, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards of North Carolina, said she was so affected by news of Singh’s death that she rewrote a speech on human rights she was due to deliver later Saturday in San Francisco.

“I thought we learned some lessons from Laramie and Matthew Shepard,” Edwards said in an interview, referring to the fatal 1998 beating of a gay college student in Wyoming that triggered an uproar over anti-gay violence.

Oh you did, did you?   Well I was just in Laramie lady, and I can tell you for a fact that they are busy trying to forget it ever happened.   Learn something?   Oh my goodness.   How to bury their fucking heads in the sand deeper maybe.

The first time I visited Laramie since the murder, I was driving through on my way back home to Baltimore.   I thought I’d swing through the town and see if I could find the place where Shepard was killed and pay my respects.   But without knowing exactly where it was, other then a general description of the site, it was hopeless and I had to give up.   So I drove through town looking for any sign, any acknowledgment, of what had happened.   Maybe a little poster in some window somewhere.   Maybe a little plaque.   Some notice somewhere, anywhere, that gay folks would be coming here to morn and pay their respects.   I found exactly nothing.

Okay, thinks I…next time I come, I’ll know the location beforehand.   So I did a small amount of poking around and found the spot where Shepard’s dying body was found and looked it up on a map.   Shepard was driven from The Fireside bar near the edge of the downtown part of Laramie, out to Snowy View Road.   I’d already read that the property owner had torn down the deer fence that Shepard had been tied too, out of pique that so many people were leaving flowers and tributes there.   But I figured I could still stand at the spot for a moment or two and morn.

It was not to be…

The road leading to the site is now marked with signs warning you that it is a private drive, not a public road, and that everyone should keep out.   That entire area is now off limits to the public.   You can’t get anywhere near the place where Shepard’s dying body was found anymore.

I suppose at some point, they’ll do something like build a condo right on top of the spot where it happened.   Or maybe a nice tennis court.

Over and over again in this struggle for our freedom and human dignity, I am put in mind of the words of Malcolm X.   He was not anything near the peacemaker that Martin Luther King Jr. was, but he knew what progress meant…

If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife.

Progress is healing the wound… Hate crime legislation, anti discrimination laws, same sex marriage…these are all good things, necessary things.   But real progress toward gay equality, toward that day when gay people can live side-by side with our heterosexual neighbors in peace and good will, won’t happen, won’t even begin to happen, until straight America is willing to begin healing the wound.   And not only are they not pulling out the knife, in Laramie, they’re still trying to make people forget it’s even there.

And this is why gay people are still being murdered every year in America, for no other reason then that they are gay.   Too many people hate us enough to kill us, to think of killing us as some kind of sport, or a rite of passage into manhood.   And too many other people don’t give a shit.   Hate, and it’s lover, Contempt, just keep doing their dance on our lives, their dance over our bodies.

That was why Matthew Shepard was killed, make no mistake.   ABC News can get away with helping the religious right whitewash that basic fact of the killing, because few people outside of the gay community will bother making the trip to Laramie to see the place where it all happened for themselves.   But last night I drove from about where Shepard was kidnapped to the place where his killers tied him to a fence, put their cigarettes out on his skin, and beat his skull open with the butt of a pistol.

You go out of the downtown section…you drive for blocks…past the university…past the outlying convenience stores…a few fast food joints…some liquor stores…out to the edge of town and beyond.   Into the rolling sage.   Into the darkness.   I know why they turned off onto Pilot Peak Road now.   Pilot Peak was their last turn off before the Interstate.   They had to make that left, or they would have been on the Interstate and from there it was either drive back toward town or drive for miles to Happy Jack Road.   So they took the left onto Pilot Peak Road and drove back into that sub division as far as they could.   Into the darkness.   Where no one would see.   Where their handiwork wouldn’t be discovered for a long time.

You take that drive…out of town…far away from the town lights…into the night…and you start thinking to yourself…This was a robbery? No way.   Just.   No.   Way.     There were two of them against one small, 112 pound boy and they passed plenty of nice, quiet, dark places where they could have taken Shepard, robbed him, dumped him, and driven off. Hell…they passed plenty of places where they could have just shot him dead and driven off without being seen.   You don’t drive that far out of town, into the middle of nowhere, just to rob a 112 pound kid.   You drive him there because you intend to spend a while enjoying yourself beating a faggot to death while he begs for his life and nobody can hear him scream for help, and you don’t want the body discovered before you’ve had a chance to clean up and get rid of the evidence.

That was always the plan, from the moment they got him into the truck.   If you doubt that, take the drive yourself some night, from downtown Laramie to Snowy View Road, and try to convince yourself that they only intended to rob him.

Lessons?   Lessons?   There is no memorial to Matthew Shepard anywhere in Laramie that I could find, the site of this beating is off limits to the public now, and thanks to ABC News, people are calling Matthew Shepard a Meth addict who knew his killers, and maybe even had sex with them once or twice.   And the killing goes on.   They’re learning how to live with the increasing stench of their own prejudices is what they’re learning.   Because that is still preferable to treating homosexuals as their neighbors.

[Edited a tad…]

[Update…]   The Good People of Laramie eventually did decide to erect a memorial after all. Ladies and Gentlemen, I hereby present you with the Matthew Shepard Memorial…bench.

Dialogue anyone?

PRESS STATEMENT
July 17, 2007

Love In Action received no formal notice of Mr. Toscano’s arrival, not did he invite us to participate in today’s proceedings, though it is apparent he did take the time to invite media sources…

Blah, blah, woof woof…  And you took the time to prepare a statement for the press and have a bunch of them printed up with with your logo and web site address and attach a tasteful little business card with your Communications Coordinator‘s name on it to every one.  So you knew it was happening, and in fact, Peterson has been talking to you John Smid.

But then…you knew that.  The wall is yellow John. 

More on the Survivor’s Initiative at Love In Action last Tuesday, and Peterson’s response to the LIA press statement Here.   In the meantime, I have some photos…

David Christie (right) and Brandon Tidwell display the collages of their
life journeys they would later present to the Love In Action staff.
At their request I’ve blurred out the details in the artwork.

 Some of the local folks who came out to support the survivors…

Brandon and David return from delivering their collages
to the LIA staff.  The only point at which anyone from LIA
came out to talk to anyone was to deliver copies of their
press statement.  I’ve no idea what was said at the door to
LIA, but the meeting was short.

 Brandon gets some artwork to take back home with him.
One of the protesters gave Brandon her poster and I’m
a tad jealous because that was a real good one.  I’d watched
them making it and a bunch of other good ones just before
the first anniversary protest last year.

LIA’s Press Statement

Someone had put them there, to keep them from blowing
away I guess, and I thought it made a good shot.  I think
that’s one of Morgan’s tripods.

It’ll be lite posting for a while here because as of…er…Right Now…I’m heading out to the big highways to visit some friends, attend the Open Source Developer’s Conference in Portland, and do some exploring along the way.  I’ll be on the road most of the day today, but I’m heading for Memphis and I’ll stay there for a while to see some friends, and…stand with Soul Force in front of Love In Action.  Via Peterson Toscano…

Ex-Gay Survivor Initiative Heads to Memphis

What: Gay men visit Love in Action to tell of the psychological and spiritual harm that they experienced there and in other "ex-gay" ministries. Three survivors of the controversial residential program will present Love in Action with personal artwork depicting the damage caused by the message that gays and lesbians can and should change their sexual orientation.

When: Tuesday, July 17, at 10:30 a.m.

Where: Love in Action, 4780 Yale Road, Memphis, Tennessee

Who: David Christie is a former Love in Action client who spent 13 years in ex-gay therapy before accepting himself as a gay man at the age of 28.
Brandon Tidwell completed Love in Action’s adult residential program in 2002, but ultimately rejected the organization’s theology and reconciled his sexual orientation with his Christian faith.

Other participants: Jeffrey Harwood, Lance Carroll

Why: Love in Action (LIA) is a Christian residential program that claims to help clients "break out" of "homosexual attraction and behavior" at a cost of $7000 for 3 months. In 2005, the facility was under investigation by the state of Tennessee for operating a mental health facility without a license. LIA has since changed its operating procedures to avoid state regulation. Most recently, LIA closed its controversial Refuge program for teenagers and replaced it with "Family Freedom Intensives," a 4-day, $600 per person. The program is for parents of gay or questioning teenagers.

Love in Action is part of a larger "ex-gay" movement, which continues to thrive in spite of Americans’ growing conviction that sexual orientation is not subject to change and despite a growing willingness on the part of faith communities to accept gays and lesbians as whole and valuable members.

This event is part of the Survivor’s Initiative, a national campaign to share the stories of "Ex-gay Survivors"-men and women who feel that ex-gay messages and programs did them more harm than good.

If you are in or near Memphis, come and show your solidarity. Also, spread the word. It’s been two years since the summer protests sparked by Zach Stark’s blog entries. No matter how LIA words it, Refuge is no more. Even so, the voices of their former LIA clients need to be heard as a witness and a warning.

If you can be there to stand peacefully in witness and solidarity with the survivors, please come.  The ex-gay movement cynically pleads tolerance for religious diversity and freedom of choice but they have none to offer themselves for gay people.  They instill shame where there should be joy.  They teach fear where there should be love.  They build walls of shame and fear and mistrust between parents and their children.  All so that our hearts may bleed, so that they can feel righteous.  If there is such a thing as Sin in this world, Capital S, then to put a dagger of shame into a person’s heart and take away the possibility of finding that intimate other and building a life together, must surely be a big one.  For years the ex-gay ministries have claimed that thousands have changed.  Now another voice is making itself heard: that of the ones who tried, and who learned after great hardship and pain that to finally become whole persons, they first had to accept themselves, in the words of the old spiritual, "Just As I Am." 

Come, stand with us if you can, in witness and in solidarity.  Just as you are.  Just as we are.

Via Ex-Gay Watch…  PFOX is getting a tad pissed off at all those militant ex-ex-gays.  On their MySpace page (!) they’ve posted "A letter from an "Ex-Gay" to "Ex-Ex Gay" Organizations!", which starts off thusly…

While you all claim in websites, protests, in organizations, or coalitions, to want to help people who are “trapped in homosexuality,” you seem to be more concerned with sticking your nose in my business, and telling me the way you think I should live, along with who I am.

Whoops!  Sorry.  What this guy actually wrote was…

While you all claim in websites, protests, in organizations, or coalitions, to want to help people who are “trapped in the ex-gay movement,” you seem to be more concerned with sticking your nose in my business, and telling me the way you think I should live, along with who I am.

Sorry about that.  Really.  Meanwhile (again via Ex-Gay Watch…), PFOX is still battling the Montgomery County Maryland Board Of Education to insure that the only things taught in sex education classes about homosexuals and homosexuality are what the ex-gay movement wants taught.  Not that they want to be telling anyone how they think they should live mind you…

So the San Diego Padres, in a gesture of good will to the gay community, hosted a pride night at yesterday’s game.  Given that many gay couples go to the games are families with kids, the Padres cheerfully offered to give their kids 14 and younger free Padres floppy hats.  Of course you just know this made the kook pews go nuclear…

What began as a few angry parents in San Diego, has now turned into a major blunder on the part of the political powerbrokers within the Padres administrative offices. However, the Padres are not backing down. They are choosing the side of homosexuality over the protection of kids, as well as the rights of parents to choose when they teach their kids about sexuality. Parents at the July 8th game will be forced to explain homosexuality, lesbianism and transsexuality to their little boys and little girls because of the celebration of gay pride during the Braves-Padres game.

Rally organizer James Hartline hopes that educational flyers being distributed to families coming to the ballpark will discourage parents from bringing their children inside of the stadium where they will be exposed to radical elements of the homosexual movement. Rally sponsor Scott Lively, President of Defend the Family International, hopes that the Christian response to the gay pride celebration at Petco Park will serve as a catalyst for awakening parental responsibility in a very sexualized culture.

…"We will not abandon these kids to the destruction of homosexuality," says Dennis Martinez, a former national skateboard champion. A committed Christian and well-respected minister among America’s troubled youth, Martinez decided that he could not allow his ministry or its employees to compromise their commitment to Christ.

And…fat lot of good it did too…

Boycott of gay pride event at Padres game fizzles

As boycotts go, yesterday’s protest at Petco Park flopped – like the hats.

Objecting to the confluence of two promotions at last night’s Padres game – “Pride Night,” a group event for local gays and lesbians, and a team giveaway of floppy hats to children 14 and younger – several Christian and conservative groups called for a public protest and boycott of the game.

Roughly 75 protesters showed up outside Petco Park’s front gate dressed in red T-shirts emblazoned with the message “Save Our Kids.” They handed out fliers. A few attempted to talk with Padre fans as they arrived for the 5:05 p.m. game that was nationally televised on ESPN.

“We’re here to inform parents, to warn them about what’s happening inside (the ballpark),” said James Hartline, a self-described Christian activist who directed the protest. “Bringing together homosexuals with baseball and kids is beyond bounds. We’re trying to get people to turn around, not go to the game, and we’re succeeding.”

If so, it wasn’t readily apparent. Official attendance for the game was 41,026, just short of a capacity crowd for the 42,685-seat ballpark.

And…oh look James…it wasn’t just the gay fans who were ignoring you… 

“Values start and are taught in the home. Just because you see a bum on the street doesn’t turn you into a bum,” said Robert Davila of El Cajon before walking through the gates with his wife and two young children.

Not that gay people are bums…but you get the idea.  Gay isn’t something you catch like a cold.  But the subtext here, as always, isn’t that simply seeing gay people would turn the kids gay, but that gay people are predators that children should be taught to be afraid of.  The better to make them fear and loath their gay classmates as they get older.  The better to make them fear and loath themselves if they are gay. That’s what the Save Our Children slogan has always been about, ever since Antia Bryant used it back in 1977.

You can see why the bigots were bursting a vein over this.  If gay and straight can sit down together with their families and enjoy a baseball game together, what next?

So the morning after our Forth of July party, Jon and I are out getting a bite to eat at Panera Bread, a nearby sandwich shop.   Jon is still playing with his new iPhone, and he wants to see how well it works with the free wireless hotspot at Panera Bread.

We sit down to a light breakfast (really light for me because I’m still feeling a tad hungover from the previous night…), and Jon calls up a few items on the Safari browser built into the iPhone.  Then for kicks and grins he tries to call up my web site.  But the wireless at Panera Bread blocks it, with a message that my site is being blocked because its content is pornographic.

WTF???  The most risqué this site gets is on the cartoon prologue to my cartoon series A Coming Out Story, where I talk about the time my straight high school pals dragged me to see my first X-rated movie.  I’d give the content of that one an R rating at best.  I just don’t do X.  X is obvious.  I don’t do obvious, I don’t feel comfortable treating sex that way.  It isn’t me.  (There’s a reason why the character of my Libido in A Coming Out Story is always wearing a fig leaf…)  I figure some blue nosed jackass took a look at my site and saw that it was full of unashamedly gay content and complained to the filtering software company.

The blocking message provides a link to where you can complain if you think you’re being blocked unfairly, and I give it some thought.  I’m not entirely happy about being accused of being a pornographer.  But on the other hand, I’m certain this isn’t about any suggestive content in my cartoons, so much as the political content of the blog, and perhaps the political cartoons.  I’m gay, and I’m fine with that, and as far as some people are concerned, that makes me X-rated.  Which makes this blocking notice I’m looking at a political statement.

Jon helpfully tells me that there are rating services I can subscribe to which will rate my website and help keep it unblocked, and I instantly have images of something like the old Comics Code Authority plastered on the top of my cartoons and I hate it.  No.  No.  That is not going to happen.  The only rating my cartoons, or anything else on my web site that I publish will ever have stamped on them, is the only one that matters:  My name.

I may still request a little clarification from the filtering company that Panera Bread is using.  In the meantime, if you have trouble accessing my website from some public place send me an email and I’ll tell you a few ways to get past it.  Jon and I eventually brought my website up at Panera Bread’s anyway.  And in the context of Kultar Kampf, being censored is more like a badge of honor then a stain on your reputation.

Yesterday, on the way to our weekly happy hour gathering, I tell Joe about having my web site censored for pornographic content.  He congratulates me.

"The Internet treats censorship as damage, and it routes around it."
-John Gilmore

[Edited a Tad…]  In the comments Jon tells me it was Panera Bread not Cosi as I’d originally said…

Theory and experiment alike become meaningless unless the scientist brings to them, and his fellows can assume in him, the respect of a lucid honesty with himself. The mathematician and philosopher W. K. Clifford said this forcibly at the end of his short life, nearly a hundred years ago.

If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done by the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may even prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest. What hurts society is not that it should loose it’s property, but that it should become a den of thieves; for then it must cease to be a society. This is why we ought not to do evil that good may come; for at any rate this great evil has come, that we have done evil and are made wicked thereby.

This is the scientist’s moral: that there is no distinction between ends and means. Clifford goes on to put this in terms of the scientist’s practice:

In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous.

And the passion in Clifford’s tone shows that to him the word credulous had the same emotional force as ‘a den of thieves’

The fulcrum of Clifford’s ethic here, and mine, is the phrase ‘it may be true after all.’ Others may allow this to justify their conduct; the practice of science wholly rejects it. It does not admit the word ‘true’ can have this meaning. The test of truth is the known factual evidence, and no glib expediency nor reason of state can justify the smallest self-deception in that. Our work is of a piece, in the large and in the detail; so that if we silence one scruple about our means, we infect ourselves and our ends together.

-Jacob Bronowski “Science and Human Values” 1956

Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin and Mike Airhart over at Ex-Gay Watch react positively to a blog post by Exodus affiliated minister   Karen Keen, about her experience attending some of the events at the Ex-Gay Survivor’s Conference.   Jim calls it “…a very lovely and grace-filled post.”   Mike says of it that it is an “…accurate, balanced and thoughtful account.”   Allow me to be the grouch here.   Accurate it may well have been.   Balanced, perhaps.   Graceful…well it depends.   It was certainly polite.   But I wouldn’t go so far even as to say it was respectful.   What it was, was patronizing.   There is a spiritual sense of the word ‘grace’ that speaks to unconditional loving and caring and unless you think that looking for better ways to put innocent people through unmitigated hell out of a thoughtless devotion to dogma amounts to grace I’d have to say grace filled, along with thoughtful it was not.   When people say things like this you need to take it seriously for what it is…

As we munch on bok choy and shrimp, Scott, Sonia and I listen to stories and concerns regarding ex-gay ministry. Our goal is not to criticize or argue, but to take the concerns seriously and learn how ex-gay groups can improve their ministries.

Emphasis mine.   She was there to observe the broken ones, and try to figure out some better ways of fixing them.   To take the concerns of the people she sat down to dinner with seriously is a mutually exclusive proposition to learning how ex-gay groups can improve their ministries, because if going into it the assumption was that the people she was sitting down to eat with were broken and needed fixing, then the degree to which their concerns needed to be listened to was limited from the get-go.   Clearly, the only thought she was willing to entertain throughout the course of her interaction with the people at the Survivor’s Conference was how to fix the fixing process.   But that the fixing process could not not itself be fixed because it was based on a flawed and disastrous premise was never, Could Never be considered…er…Seriously.   Which meant that she wasn’t so much listening to her dinner companions, as filtering what they were saying to her through the main preconception she brought to that dinner with her.   This isn’t somebody who came to listen.   But then she couldn’t.

When she says that the raw expressions she witnessed during the survivor’s chalk talk moved her more then she expected, I’m sure that was genuine.   But that’s not to say it moved her very much, because what it should have made her was ashamed.   Deeply, gravely, severely ashamed.   There, right before her eyes, were the raw, anguished torn from the gut expressions of the suffering those people needlessly endured at the hands of the likes of her, simply for being homosexual.   And even that was not enough to make her question change.   But it couldn’t have.   In the end, she writes…

I realize I was drawn to the Survivor Conference because I love these people. In some impossible way, I long for camaraderie and unity with ex-ex-gays with whom I have shared so many of the same life struggles and pain. Yet, at the end of the day our roads lead us apart, and I wish it wasn’t so. I leave the Survivor Conference knowing it will be my last ex-ex-gay conference. I feel an ache in my heart—the kind of sadness that comes when breaking up with a lover. Even when irreconcilable differences are clear, and parting is the most honest thing to do, the loss is still felt. I want to take my friend by the hand and walk her down the same life path I am traveling, but I know I can’t.

And in the comments at Ex-Gay Watch she elaborates…

Another clarification–when I talk about how the two groups (ex gay and ex-ex gay) are on separate roads that lead apart, I did not mean to infer that I will not engage in dialogue anymore. I am always open to hearing people’s thoughts and stories. I comment on this a bit in response to someone’s comment on my blog. What I was describing is that the two movements have different goals that cannot be reconciled. I am all for church unity, but there are some things that cannot be unified without comprising our own personal integrity.

Integrity.     I happen to believe that the so called “clobber passages” of the bible don’t actually say what a lot of homophobes think they say.   But let’s assume for the sake of argument that they do.   So what.   In addition to calling on the faithful to put homosexuals to death, the bible also insists that the faithful not suffer witches to live.   Innocent people died once upon a time in Salem Massachusetts because of those passages, and you best believe that the people who put them to death did so in good conscience, and prayed afterwards for God to have mercy on the immortal souls of those poor devil possessed witches.   But it is not integrity to put theology above the observable and knowable humanity of the old woman whose head your are putting into a noose.   The word for that is fanaticism.

It is not at the end of the day that Karen Keen’s road diverged from that of the survivors.   It was at the beginning, at that point along the way where we all decide whether we will walk down the path before us with our eyes wide open or not.   That the survivors eventually came to the conclusion that their treatment at the hands of the ex-gay ministries was not only not working, but could not be made to work, and then that it was unnecessary to begin with, doesn’t mean that they had fallen back into “the lifestyle” but that at least after some horrific measure of pain and suffering they were willing, finally, to let the evidence speak for itself.   When you embrace a religious faith that insists its written dogmas have to count for more then the observable facts, more even, then your own first hand experience, more then the witnessing of pain and suffering, your personal integrity is the first thing you give up.

As Jacob Bronowski wrote in Science and Human Values…

The state of mind, the state of society, is of a piece.   When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, we discard in it what a man is.

Likewise, when we discard the test of fact in what a homosexual is, we also discard in it the human being that they, and you, are.   Integrity.

That’s something I was taught to consider in a structured analysis and design class I attended once and it’s the kind of thinking that we should all practice.  You really need sometimes to look critically at the obvious, the taken-for-granted, those "everyone knows such-and-such is true" truths.  They can be delicate, nearly invisible curtains hiding from your eyes the reality that’s staring you back in the face.

Via aTypical Joe, comes this story of 81 words that were once in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), and how they were there in the first place, simply because everyone just assumed they were true.  And this particular assumption got its first really critical looking at, when Evelyn Hooker, a psychologist at UCLA, met Sam From, a student…

Evelyn was a psychologist at UCLA and Sam was her student. He was also a homosexual. They started spending time together in the mid 1940s and Sam introduced Evelyn to his group of friends most of whom, like Sam, were gay.

Now, as I said, everyone in this group was homosexual but curiously, none was in therapy. They were all well-adjusted young men who utterly failed to conform to the traditional psychiatric image of the tortured, disturbed homosexual.

This, naturally, got Evelyn thinking.

Now, prior to Evelyn Hooker, all of the research on homosexuality – all of it – was done on people who were already under serious psychiatric treatment. Let me repeat that: In the history of psychiatric research, no one had ever conducted a study on a homosexual population that wasn’t either in therapy, in prison, a mental hospital, or the disciplinary barracks of the armed services.

Evelyn thought about this and decided that this kind of research was distorting psychiatry’s conclusions about homosexual populations. To test her theory, Evelyn came up with an experiment. Through her former student she located 30 homosexuals who had never sought therapy in their lives and matched those homosexuals with a group of heterosexuals of comparable age, IQ and education.

Evelyn then put both groups through a battery of psychological tests including a Rorschach Test, the famous ink-blot test. After disguising her subjects, Evelyn gave the results to three experienced psychiatrists and asked them to identify the homosexuals. She figured that if homosexuals were inherently pathological, the psychiatrists would be able to pick them out easily. But the judges were completely unable to distinguish the homos from the hets.

Equally important was the fact that the judges categorized two thirds of the homosexuals and the heterosexuals as perfectly well-adjusted normally functioning human beings. 

Hooker’s study challenged the idea that homosexuality was a pathology in the first place, and in doing this it not only called into question an entire generation of research on homosexuality, it also challenged psychiatry’s basic concept of disease. If you believed Hooker’s data the only conclusion you could come to was that psychiatry was deciding that certain behaviors were diseases, not out of any sort of scientific proof, but based on their own prejudices.

Beside Evelyn Hooker, psychiatrists who wanted to change the DSM really had only one other scientific study on their side: Alfred Kinsey’s famous 1948 sex survey which found that a whopping 37% of all men had had physical contact to the point of orgasm with other men, a finding which – besides shocking the hell out of 63% of the American public – seemed to suggest that homosexual acts were too common to be considered a disease.

In spite of all this work, psychiatry continued to maintain that the homos were sick and steadfastly refused to reevaluate the DSM. And then luck, or maybe fate, intervened.

This is but a small excerpt from a really good This American Life broadcast, which originally aired in January 2002.  It’s available for listening at the link above.  If you have iTunes it can also be purchased for ninty-five cents.  I highly recommend it.  The broadcast is the story of the DSM change as told by Alix Spiegel, the granddaughter of the man who was the president elect of the APA when the change occurred.  Like many profound historical events, this one is something more, and something less, then the mythologies that have grown up around it.  It involved political theater, and behind the scenes activism.  It involved many diverse people from many diverse backgrounds…most of them heterosexual, some of them gay.  Most of the gays in the APA at that time were in fact, deeply, deeply closeted, and what is probably a striking thing for modern ears to hear is how many of them accepted the prevailing assumptions about the pathology of homosexuality.

But if the internal behind the scenes politics, and the external pressure of gay activists accomplished anything, it was to hasten what the science would eventually compel them to do anyway.  That is not to ether dismiss, nor exaggerate the impact of the activism.  There is a scene near the end of Alix Spiegel’s story that needs to be in any film or TV recreation of these events, and it is that moment when Robert Spitzer is brought by one of the activists who had been protesting the APA’s categorizing of homosexuality as an illness, uninvited, to a gathering of the closeted gay professionals, and he sees how many distinguished and successful people of his profession are homosexual, people he would never have suspected, people whose accomplishments were considerable, people who would, every one of them, have been drummed out of their profession had their sexual orientation become known then.  For Spitzer, it is a profound revelation.  And then…a young man in uniform walks in the door.

You should listen to this episode.  It’s nearly an hour long but well worth it, to get to that scene.  There is a historian toward the end who says that questions of disease and pathology ultimately resolve down to moral questions, not scientific ones.  I disagree.  Science can certainly tell us whether or not something is or is not harmful to us mentally and physically.  And the moral question was answered millenia ago: First Do No Harm…  But there is a profound moral question at the bottom of every scientific one and that is the question of truthfulness and letting the evidence speak for itself.  Even if means you have to discard a cherished assumption you’ve held on to for years.  Even if that assumption has given you the recognition of your peers, fame, and made you a pretty good living. 

Robert Spitzer has taken a lot of justly deserved criticism for his so-called study of clients of ex-gay ministries, but you have to give the man credit for that one dazzling moment near the end of this report, when he let the evidence he could clearly see with his own two eyes, finally, speak for itself.  Charles Socrades comes off by contrast, as a man so blinded by dogma that he’s even willing to regard himself as a parental failure to his own gay son.  But as he says, his business was booming.  He speaks with pride toward the end about some parents who took their 16 year old gay son to one psychiatrist after another, only to be told there was nothing wrong with the boy…until they met him.

And now you know what happens to a soul that stops asking questions.

I posted this on a MySpace discussion group just this morning, where a sixteen year old preacher’s son told the others that he was being sent to an ex-gay camp.  He said he doesn’t want to be gay, that it’s a sin, and that he hated the urges he was having.  This is my reply to him.

I’m reposting it here because you have to know that there are many other kids out there just like him, feeling alone and miserable about urges they’re having that they can’t seem to control, and which shame them deeply.  It just breaks your heart sometimes.  If there’s any shame here, it ought to be falling down hard on the shoulders of the adults in their lives who won’t teach them to reach for that higher ground where urges can become the beautiful desires two people in love feel for one another, because if gay kids can stand tall and proud and love wholeheartedly, then those adults just can’t feel righteous…

Yeah, some people say that simply being gay is a sin. Some people say that it’s just acting on it that’s the sin. And then again, some folks say the universe is less then nine-thousand years old too. Here’s what I say: when the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird.

I’m sorry you’re being troubled by urges. That’s not unusual at your age. Gay and straight alike, we all go through adolescence. And it can be a difficult time no matter what your sexual orientation is. It’s the walk from childhood into adulthood. And part of being an adult, is learning to deal with sex and sexuality. In your teenage years especially, that part of you can yank you around like a big yapping dog on a leash, always tugging you this way and that toward whatever it finds interesting, the instant it catches sight of it. It can be really hard to deal with, especially when you’re young.

Straight kids usually get to learn at this stage, about dating, and about love, and about what it means to become a worthy lover, and find someone to love and be loved by. The really troubling thing about how gay kids are often treated, even these days, is that their urges aren’t allowed to become anything more then urges, aren’t allow to develop into anything higher and more noble then lusts. They’re not told that they too can reach for that higher ground where two people can find a soulmate in each other, and nurture and share an intimate body and soul romance between them.

That is one of the most perfect joys of this life there is…to find your other half, and to love and be loved by them. But like anything else important in life, you have to learn how, you have to make yourself ready for it, and become worthy of it, and gay kids are taught only that all they have, and all they ever will have, are urges. A kind of acid is slowly poured over their capacity to love and trust and accept love and trust from another, and the possibility of finding that soulmate, that intimate other, is carefully and deliberately taken away from them. If there is such a thing as Sin in this world, capital S, then doing that to someone has to be a big one.

If you’re worried about being gay, you’re worrying about the wrong thing. Worry instead that you are trustworthy, that your word is good, that your friends can trust you, that you do your share of the work, that you never become the kind of person who takes advantage of other people who are weaker then yourself, or more vulnerable, that you care that your community, and your country are better for your having walked in it, and that the people you take into your arms, whether they’re male or female, are better for having been loved by you, and not worse. That’s the important stuff in life. The rest is detail. I tell you that if you take care of the important stuff, the detail will work itself out.

It’s true.  Some years ago, after Maryland started allowing us to view our grade school records, I took a trip to my old High School and asked to see mine.  Reading all the comments in my file from all the teachers I’d had over the years was a real eye opener.  Two of them stood out in particular: one from a fifth grade teacher who wrote Bruce "Takes excessive interest in personal art projects".  The other was a write-up by one of my first grade teachers for a discipline infraction.  I’d been caught kissing other boys.

It wasn’t until I read her words that I even remembered the incident.  Perhaps I’d just shut it out of my mind all those years because the embarrassment was too much for my little first grade sensibilities.  Or perhaps I just let the incident slide on by because I hadn’t thought it was any big deal at the time.  All I remember of it, was getting scolded for kissing a boy.  But that particular teacher was always scolding me and then dragging me into the coat closet, where she dragged all the kids at one time or another to make them pray for forgiveness because of something they did, or that she though they’d done.  I still remember how livid she was when the Supreme Court ruled that public schools can’t force the kids in them to pray.  Picture a first grade teacher standing stone faced in front of her classroom of small children, and telling them that the Supreme Court had just taken God away from them.

Which is all to say that my sexuality, even at that age, was probably already beginning to surface in various little telling ways, and that some of the adults in my life were already starting to brand me for it.  There’s a really interesting article in this weeks’ Village Voice about parents and teachers struggling to cope with developing gender and sexuality in grade school children and younger in a culture that simply doesn’t want to aknowledge that children have any such things.  But if there is a bioligical basis to sexual orientation, then its a no-brainer that they do.

But why not? We know almost nothing about gender and sexuality in young children, but what we do know is that they both emerge in children quite early.

"It varies, and development varies from child to child, but awareness of sexuality begins in elementary school," says Caitlin Ryan, a researcher studying LGBT families with the Family Acceptance Project in California. "Even though adults who work with children or adolescents are typically not aware of this as part of their professional training, regardless, it’s happening. It’s very common for young people to have attractions to same-sex peers if they’re young."

I remember my grade school crushes to this day.  I often drove my friends back then crazy with my heated emotional attachments.  In those days though, strange as it may sound today, a young boy was almost expected to dislike girls and find more emotional gratification in his male pals until he got to a certain age.  There was a saying for it "Going through a phase…"  As time went on and my male pals began their first tentative efforts at courtship, I would reach for that saying to describe myself and my own emotional responses to the same and the opposite sex, over and over again like a mantra.  "I’m just going through a phase…just going through a phase…just going through a phase…"   I had no idea what it meant, but it sounded like a good enough excuse to avoid dating girls…something I was really really not interested in.

If only someone had told me that I could date boys instead.  Oh…I’d have jumped right on that… 

Just ask the parents. "In their kindergarten class, I’ve definitely observed three or four of the boys being flirtatious, with both girls and other boys," says the mother of the little boy who wants to marry his "god brother."

Ryan says that elementary school health teachers have told her that they hear children talking about crushes beginning as early as kindergarten. "Children can describe thinking of Valentine’s day and of having that little special feeling of having butterflies in their stomach," she says. "Why would we think that this is only something that takes place in their twenties?"

And why would we think that only straight kids are getting twitterpated? Is it because we still think gayness is such an undesirable outcome?

Twitterpated.  I love it.  Describes my schoolboy crushes perfectly.  Twitterpated.  Except I had no idea what it was all about, because I wasn’t allowed to know that boys could fall in love with other boys.  Those years could have been a lot happier for me then they were.  Every kid should be allowed to get twitterpated without getting dragged into the closet to pray for forgiveness.

Via 365Gay.Com…

NY Gay Marriage Bill Declared ‘Dead On Arrival’ In Senate

(Albany, New York) The Assembly passed same-sex marriage legislation Tuesday night, but the state’s highest ranking Republican vowed not to allow it to come to a vote in the Senate.

And what’s hilarious about all this is that a lot of these so-called gay conservatives think all the sexual hedonism of the liberal "gay lifestyle" is wicked and we should all be about settling down and getting married and moving to the suburbs and getting rich.  The way they tell it, it’s the socialist-communist urban liberal left that’s anti same-sex marriage.  So you’d think it would be democrats who are adamantly against it.  But no… 

Just remember folks, while you’re busy kissing up to the republican establishment, that Truman Capote once said a faggot is the homosexual gentleman who just left the room.