Written 20 November 2006
I wonder sometimes about what it is people are thinking. If you don’t want to have sex with someone whose gender resembles yours, then don’t. Why are you killing us? What did we ever really do to you?
I am Gay. I like men; I like having sex with some men. I do not agree with society’s idea of what a man ought to be. Then again, Nature seems to disagree with it. The Macho Man Syndrome is the cause of more male’s deaths than anything else, according to the WHO. And we need not get into the games of chance and chicken that males are more likely to take part in. Stress caused from fear of being called Queer if a man cries for reasons other than a loved one’s death … sometimes not even then. What are you trying to prove?
And it doesn’t stop there; it is Macho to hit a woman when she is out of her place. And if he hits her hard, all the better. So, not only is your fear of appearing too feminine hurting you, it is hurting others. I wonder if this War with Iraq and Hezbola isn’t just some way of proving you have cajones? Funny thing is, though, you won’t go to war, or send your children, just the children of the not-so-well-to-do and the not-so-wasp. So, what have you really proven, that you can send someone else to their death, just can’t face it yourself!
But a gang of you can sure show your balls by beating up on some isolated Queen. Yes, fear us, there is only one thing more frightening than an angry Queen with nothing left to lose, and that is a Mother protecting her cubs. And yet, you can’t meet us in a fair fight, one on one, man to Queen. You have to gang up on us, four, ten, twenty at a time against one. And the Queen might have nothing except maybe a nail file to protect herself. How is that a fair fight!?
And some young child of 13 thinks he might be queer. How does mother and father help him address it? They send him to the streets. “Better dead than queer” they say. And on the street, where his age is too young to get honest wages, he has only one thing to sell, her or his body. And how does he escape this cruel world? Suicide, or its half-assed cousin, drug abuse. Maybe the youngling saw someone in the showers at school and got interested. And maybe he could have grown up to be a sensitive father and husband; but no, our machismo won’t allow for any of that queer stuff. He better keep his feelings to himself or out on the street he goes! And they want to blame us for the loss of family values in America. We didn’t do it, you did!
Now, all of that gets my dandruff up in a snow storm. Yet here is the real kicker, politics. First, they use us to make them look good. They close our bars, keep us from hotel rooms, airplanes. Oh, they will let us in, just so long as we don’t look like we are going to show PDA’s. You have become like the French, you want our money, just not us. But they want us, just a little. After all, we are proof that they are doing all they can for America. Should we show affection in any place other than Designated Queer Zones — like Palm Springs — they will rail on us, and use that railing to get or keep their office. What, don’t believe me?
In the recent elections (2006) the most frequent Republican campaign promise was, “Don’t vote for her, she’s queer!” What does her being queer or queer friendly have anything to do with the sky rocketing debt in America, or the high rate of hunger in the ghettoes? We have been fighting wars for longer than any since our Civil War, and what have we to gain for it: mothers bereft of their children, high gas prices, and the biggest debt since Nixon. Do the Republicans promise to fix that? Wouldn’t that do more than complaining about queer marriages? family values? And what did the Republicans get for their slogan? Fired!
And now the Democrats will placate us, tell us we are nice pets to have around, makes them look good. Are we any better off? Let us see if we can actually change history.
I have been to Hell: it is not such a bad place, unless you give up, and fade into the background. Sometimes the world does not work the way we would like. Life can be wonderful; mostly it is just not fair. Some humans will make it worst. People will step on you, push you aside, ridicule you, belittle, demoralize, and call you names that will hurt till you are in the grave. When you have lost everything, and have nothing left to lose, that is Hell. That is Heaven, too. With nothing to hold you back, you can step forward and start making changes.
I raise my voice, along side the millions of disenfranchised Bohemians, Civil rights advocates, and civil and spiritual dissidents to make the world a better place for people to express themselves. Do not make me into the darkness that makes your shady light look good. It only makes your shady light look worst. You can try to push us back into the closet, try to make us pretend so that you can be comfortable; we have burnt that closet, watch while all the pretty little stereotypes fly up in ashes. We might use those ashes to decorate a new night. Let us be an us instead of a them, be ourselves instead of them, be real, instead of being artificial, pretentious, and glib. Let us set the standards, even if no one else agrees with us.
There is only one thing more depressing than the oppressed without a comforter, and that is when the oppressors have no one to comfort them. Queens won the fight at Stonewall Inn because we didn’t have anything to lose, and everything to gain. We have each other. You isolate yourselves in your churches and refuse to let us in. You isolate yourselves in your ball clubs and won’t let us in. We can toss a ball just as well, maybe even better; and a queer Christian might be closer to Christ than a hate and war mongering Christnick.
In the days of Christ, the worst disease one could catch was leprosy. It was easy enough to catch, one need only be in lingering contact, skin to skin, with a leper. And yet, Christ embraced them, and healed them. hiv/aids is harder to catch; one must have lingering contact with fresh blood material to catch it. Hugging an aids person won’t pass the plague onto you. Kissing an aids person won’t pass the plague onto you. Screwing an aids person in the ass with a condom won’t pass the plague onto you. So, why do you kick us out of your homes, your churches, your military? You would think putting someone behind a gun who knows he will die sooner than later would have benefits. And aids is not a Gay plague, it is a human plague.
¡Grow up!
I also raise my voice to say, belittling, demeaning, and demoralizing Queers will not make you look good; it only makes you look unimaginative. Get to know at least one Queer, personally, or rather twenty, because we are a diverse group, growing, maturing, at different rates. At best, do not place yourself as an expert on GLBT unless you have gotten to know us. Let us define ourselves, and we will return the favor.
Imagine, what if we actually learned about another person, as a person, and not as a projection of our own fears. We could change the world with that.
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