Notes from the Fey Underground....

I was getting frustrated. I was reading another article on the bloody backwards minded Prime Minister trying to open the gay marriage debate again, and I saw red. Because what it all came down to was plain old, in-yer-face redneck homophobia. In this day and age no less. I could just spit. After the provincial courts basically said, "Uh, excuse me? Has anyone noticed this form of discrimination is against the Charter?", did anyone deign to do anything about it. It was agreed through almost all of the provinces (we won't mention you Alberta and your slavish devotion to the term "notwithstanding") that the marriage laws were unconstitutional and simply unfair, legal or not, and that society had matured and progressed enough to change an unfair law and outdated tenet. The country and the parliament spoke quite plainly and said O.K. and agreed that it should pass. THEN after all that, this backwards thinking reactionary PINHEAD isn't a year into office with a MINORITY gov't, and is trying to push us back into the stone-age, spending OUR money to satisfy his own homophobic prejudices. Whatever happened to Trudeau's famous, "The government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation?" I thought we were a so-called JUST society, a PROGRESSIVE society.

I sat there, inwardly steaming, and thought about how long and how hard I had to struggle inwardly to be proud of who I was, of how many years it took before I could just be offhand and unconcerned about telling people I was gay. Now, I open a newspaper only to see how this toadying ignoramus is trying to basically designate a large portion of the people he was elected to serve as second class citizens. And I ask myself, "How is this possible?" Does this moron and his confederacy of dunces know NOTHING?

Nobody chooses to be a homosexual, anymore than anybody chooses to be straight. Nobody sits down at adolescence or in the middle of a twenty year marriage and says, “Hmmm. There’s not enough angst in my life right now, let’s see, what can I do to really up the ante on the old grief sweepstakes? I know! I'll be gay!!!” Nobody without a decidedly advanced masochistic streak decides to deliberately entertain risking mass alienation, discrimination, ridicule, and violence if they can help it.

Being gay isn’t a choice. The only choice you can make about it is to tell the truth about it and accept it and dare to be happy and honest about yourself, or lie about it and have the lie ruin your life. You can’t turn it off and on like a switch. If you could, straight people could do it too. Of course, the joke is when you ask them if they can be gay, (the homophobic types that is) they look at you as if you’re mad. “Of course not!” they snap. So why do they assume anyone else can be straight on demand? Nobody can help who they're attracted to. You either are, or you're not. Its ingrained in you, like being left handed, or the colour of your skin, and your eyes. Sexuality develops with you, and as we know, that takes years. Your voice changes, you grow breasts, you start to shave, you think about sex. Same as everybody else. The only difference is, the object of your affection isn’t the girl next door, it’s the boy you play soccer with. Or the girl you play soccer with. It might happen at thirteen, or it might awaken at forty, depending on how self-accepting and self-aware you are.

As we know, homosexuality has existed since time immemorial. Its pointless to note that some of the greatest thinkers, inventors, geniuses, artists, rulers of all time have been gay. From Alexander the Great and his General Hephaesteon to Virginia Woolf to Davinci to Aristotle to Byron, Walt Whitman, Greta Garbo, kd lang all the way to my mother’s hairdressers Nory and Victor, homos are and have been everywhere, in every strata of society. It would be marvellous if we knew when the first instance of homosexuality occurred, but unfortunately, we don’t have the first recorded instance of when cro-magnon man Groog decided he really had the hots for his buddy Tonk, and not the sultry, bucktoothed, slope headed charms of the girl next door, Dag. But we can, with some assurance be fairly certain that, like the discovery of fire, it happened.

As my grandfather (a Baptist farmer who went to Church every Sunday, and who never smoked, drank or swore) said on the subject, “God created all sorts of flowers. Why should people be any different?”

Being gay (and my apologies to all of the lesbians and transgendered folk I'm leaving out by calling it that, but for brevity's sake, I'll just stick with that term as its quicker and I like it. I figured if you’re going to be called something most people already think is an aberration, you might just as well give it a happy sounding name) in a perfect world, would be something that is taken just as for granted as being left handed is. It would have been something that was just accepted, and not ruminated over torturously for hours on end. As Virginia Woolf in David Hare's adaptation of Michael Cunningham's wonderful THE HOURS, said on her struggle with madness, “ I wrestle alone in the dark, and only I can know, only I can understand my own condition”, coming to accept one’s sexuality at any age is a solitary and lonely experience. For a gay kid, it can be the most isolating and traumatizing experience of their young lives.

Take a look at the odds stacked against you for one thing; society has already condemned you for the most part, and if you were like me, growing up in a small town, the fact that one preferred reading to hockey, movies to baseball, and was not a loud boisterous rowdy kid already earmarked you as odd. Being gay just got you beat up, or worse. You hid it as best you could, or denied it to yourself, praying you’d wake up and be normal one day, or put it on the back burner of your psyche until you could deal with it one day. Many come through it and are the wiser for it. Many young people are not so lucky. Many young people are rejected, thrown out on the street, scorned and ostracized from their family and friends. Some are even killed, either often by their own hand, or by others. Many don’t survive that struggle. Many kill themselves because they imagine it is the worst thing that could possibly happen to them. They’ve been told that homosexuality is a sickness, a sin, and that they’re evil, depraved and are going to hell. Imagine subjecting a bright young mind to that kind of mental torture, all because they simply love differently. How could anyone calling themselves humane put any youngster through that kind of agony? These kids are told, and are led to believe, that it’s a crime for them to love at all.

You've heard of Jacob wrestling the dark angel at Peniel? "I will not let thee go til thou bless me, but then I will let thee go." Many youngsters think of their homosexuality like that, a struggle, or a condition, an illness, a flaw. Many never achieve the heights they’re capable of in their youth because they’re too busy tearing themselves up inside, wondering whether or not they’re sick, and if they should kill themselves.

I’ve always been gay, even before I knew what it was, or what sex was, it was always there. And what’s more, everyone who knew me, knew as well, oftimes, long before I acknowledged it to myself. In my case I’ve been enormously lucky to have been supported by a remarkable pair of parents who believed in me and never gave up on me when I was close to giving up on myself. I had a grandfather who believed in the example of Christ, that if one lives a truly unselfish life, one cannot be unhappy. I had an uncle who died too young, who let me know in no uncertain terms that gay or not, I was his nephew and he loved me as much as he did his own children. And best of all, I had a younger brother who is and always has been my rock. Mind you, he’s never been above teasing me about being gay, but then I’ve never minded teasing him about his hairline either.

When I came out to my straight, church going, motorcycle riding lady-killer of a brother at age 28 (never, by the way, do that when somebody is pulling out of a Dunkin’Donuts onto a busy on-ramp, they tend to be concentrating on their driving) he merely rolled his eyes, shook his head, and looked at me pityingly.
“PLEASE don’t tell me you’re only figuring this out now.” He said with the most scornful voice I’d ever heard him use.
“Whaddaymean?” I snapped.
“Trev,” He said, with the slow, patient voice generally used with the mentally defective, “EVERYBODY knows! Mom, Dad, everybody. Its not like it’s a big shock, you know.” “Whaddaymean everybody knows?” I yelled.
“Dude. Think about it. We’re seven and six. Its Halloween. I’m going out as Spiderman and you’re going out as Batman. At the last minute, you decide you want to go out as Wonder Woman, and you think we’re not gonna have a CLUE? How dumb do you think we are?”

Point taken.

I’ve been supported and held aloft by remarkable family and friends all of my life. I’ve been lucky. Coming out for me was largely a cause for celebration, since even more than I did at the time, all of these wonderful people simply wanted me to be happy. When I told them that my accepting the fact that I was gay was what would make me happy, they rejoiced. To them, my sexuality did not define WHO I was, it was simply a part of who I was. What I was and am to them is unique. What I am is a talented, sensitive, funny human being. The same as you are, the same as we all have the potential to be. THAT is what we should be concerned with, not with what makes us different and divides us, but what makes us alike and draws us together. I was taught and surrounded by that kind of philosophy all of my life, and so yes, I was lucky. But I was brutally aware that as lucky as I was, there were so many others who weren't nearly so fortunate.

I've had friends who've been thrown out of the house, who've lived on the streets as teenagers, who've been beaten up and had all sorts of awful things happen to them simply because their so-called loved ones let their own homophobia and hatred destroy their relationship with their child. One wonders how a rational person could let that happen. Well, it happens. Frequently. Otherwise, how can you explain a prime minister like the one we have in office? He wants to destroy a relationship with a large portion of the populace he has sworn to serve.

Nobody knows why homosexuality exists, we only know that it does. Why it does is largely irrelevant. One might as well ask why some people are left handed, and why some have red hair, or black skin. It might make for interesting scientific analysis to some day discover that there is a very specific biological reasoning for this physical and genetic diversity, that the continued survival and evolution of the human species and its society depends on it, but it is largely irrelevant really. It is here, it has always been here, and always will be here. To protest against its existence just isn’t logical. One might just as well protest against the existence of salt water. It’s a waste of energy and time.

As I recall, it was seen as a social crime (not too long ago around here) for a Protestant to marry a Catholic, or to marry inter-racially. In California, there was a law right up until the late 1940’s about miscegenation onscreen, that is, you couldn’t have a love scene onscreen between two people of different races. No kissing. The Civil Rights movement was only forty years ago, and Stonewall and the Women's Movement of the 70's happened even later than that. We like to think of Canada as a civilized society, a leader in progressing humanity forward. Yet, we still give serious consideration to the phobias and fears that hold us back as a progressive society, otherwise why would anyone give serious consideration to re-opening the marriage debates? We give in to those prejudices. We’ve made strides in gender and racial and religious inequalities and phobias (not that any of them are close to being perfect and/or fixed) so why is homosexuality the last great taboo?

Some might say it has everything to do with the emasculation of the male ego. The theory there is that some straight men have such a violent reaction to homosexuality because it denotes effeminacy, weakness, an emasculation, and because sexuality for the male is about penetration, therefore the whole homophobic issue becomes about the obsession with gay male sex.

The fear of lesbianism would therefore be logically tied in with the rejection of the male notion of sexuality, since, in effect, the male has been rendered obsolete and unwanted by the female taking control of her own sexuality. Again the issue becomes about the domination of and rejection of the male ego. And men to put it bluntly, are all about the ego. Reject that, and you’ve made them very angry, very angry indeed. Men will go to war over their egos. Hell, they’ve probably gone to war over penis size, but the history books don’t tell you that. So if that’s what this huge debate is about, and this fear of homosexuality is largely based on the straight male’s phobias about his potency and loss of masculinity through the perception of being feminine or submissive or passive, or penetrated or rejected, then perhaps we can begin to understand how to effectively fix these misapprehensions by the way we raise our sons. After all, children are taught to hate, they're not born doing it like say, breathing.

Another theory some have, is that perhaps homosexuality is there as a sign from God. Perhaps it is one of the last true meanings of the story of the Tower of Babel. Perhaps, if there is an Almighty God, he did not intend to make the road to heaven an easy one to get to. Perhaps it was meant to be earned. That in order to truly learn to love our fellow human beings, we had to get past our prejudices and phobias about what they looked like and how they sounded, and what they believed, and who they slept with, to discover their inner light, just as we hoped they would discover ours. Perhaps only then, could we truly be joined as a common humanity, and take our place with the angels.

But that’s just a guess.

I think I’d like to end this with part of a letter from the heart, from a mother. I’ve given irreverent and earnest reasons why homophobia needs to be done away with, but I think its time we hear why we seriously, morally and for the sake of all our children, cannot allow this cancer to fester on society any longer, or have it destroy any more innocent lives. Her name is Sharon Underwood, and this is part of a letter she wrote her daily newspaper in response to a homophobic letter to the editor…I found this letter ironically, on a dance album called UTOPIA, and I credit the producers for having included it in the liner notes....

“My first born son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade through high school because he was perceived to be gay. He never professed to be gay, or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called fag incessantly, starting when he was six. In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17 year old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn’t bear to continue living any longer, that he didn’t want to be gay and that he couldn’t face a life without dignity. You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don’t know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn’t put him, and millions like him, on this Earth for you to abuse. You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people around the world who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin. The deep thinking author of a letter who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about “those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing” asks, “Whatever happened to the idea of striving…to be better human beings than we are?”

Indeed sir, whatever happened to that?”