Ha. Don’t hold your breath.
Will you tell your grandchildren that you remember a time when people hated on black people because they were black and your grandchildren raise their eyebrows in disbelief?
Will you tell your grandchildren that you remember a time when nearly all top jobs in industry and government were taken by white men and your grandchildren raise their eyebrows in disbelief?
Will you tell your grandchildren that you remember a time when a gay man was shot in the face in the middle of the most liberal city in the western world for being a faggot and your grandchildren raise their eyebrows in disbelief?
A thousand years from now? Maybe that’s the kind of incremental change brown people, women and queer people expect?
When will you fight for more? Why do you put up with the status quo?
Fight for marriage and all things are equal? No. Fight for white men to stop taking everything, determining the agenda and we might get somewhere.
A French octogenarian shoots himself in the face because he hates gay marriage. If he were American he would have massacred first then killed himself. I think that this scenario seems plausible.
I wouldn’t like to hang around in gay bars right now. Not with all these emboldened haters amongst us.
Thank God I don’t drink.
I am wearing my pink shoes. People understand what I am when they look at my feet.
I’m trying to jettison ‘straight acting‘, I’m trying to abandon my invisibility but I know what that means. It means hostility from gay men and straight men.
I like it when they describe drag queens as fierce. That’s what I have spent life being: FIERCE. Of course, this has been perceived as angry or anti social or… can I explain something?
Anger is an emotion related to one’s psychological interpretation of having been offended, wronged, or denied and a tendency to react through retaliation.
Anger management? The management of justified anger.
Listen to this. I have been reasonably angry for a long time.
I was a kid and I knew I wanted to fall in love with and have sex with men (and women) but the man part of my desire was outlawed, derided.
I fell in love at school. I fell in love and explored men’s bodies.
I remember when I was 14 I was walking along the beach in Whitstable. I met a man. I lay on the sea wall with him. Furtive. Illegal. I never saw him again. I wonder about him.
They hated us for something we could not change. I ignored them. I parried the blows.
I lived in a dream world because living in that reality was simply too painful.
Margaret Thatcher didn’t want me and men and women like me… she didn’t want us to exist.
I’ll tell you what makes me angry: Brown people not getting a fair trial. A third of all black men in the USA are in jail. Women in the military being raped and sexually abused. Drag queens damning trans people. I am angry that some people are denied bail. I am angry that my lover left me when I found my tumor. I am angry with myself for falling in love with men who could never love me back. I am angry that the breast cancer gene is privately owned, that innocent brown people are still being held in captivity in Guantanamo Bay. I am angry that gay men think that marriage is the answer. I am angry that I grew up with an angry step father. I am angry that Monsanto kill bees. I am angry that my neighbors park in front of my gate so I can’t get in and out of my house. I am angry that two young girls are criminalized for falling in love. I am angry that most agents (realtors and talent) are sociopath. I am angry with gay men and straight men for over simplifying sexuality.
How do you live with that?
I set it aside. The anger. I find peace wherever I can. I pull weeds. I walk the dogs. I feed the fish.
I forgive them for their sexism, their murder, their bullying, their insistence that they WIN. At all costs. Like the bees. Winning the market means… killing the bees.
When I buy something at auction the others applaud. They congratulate me. They tell me that I have won. I didn’t win. I just paid the highest price. It’s not hard to do.
So. Today I am wearing my pink shoes. There you go. ‘Nice shoes,’ they scoff.
Oh, I’m wearing them because I’m queer and I really want you to know. Because I exist somewhere between Liberace and Jason Collins but I’m still trying to work it out. Working out what kind of man I am.
I don’t think I’m alone.
Men make their own history but they do not make it as they choose.
Karl Marx
6 replies on “Winning The War Against Homophobia/Racism/Sexism”
You are not alone. And though I am part of some mainstream life, my kids are appalled to hear of people being hurt for the color of their skin, their choice of partners, the substandard medical and mental healthcare, the sheer starvation of love and food right in our midst.
I am public about being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I openly support my gay friends. I love my kilts because I’m still a tomboy and kilts are skirts with pockets, and kinda not. I police the misuse of gender and sex. (One is the body’s expression of the chromosomes. The other is the way the mind’s expression of characteristics assigned to the sexes.). I’m not a hero and I’m not abnormal. I live my life as true as I am able. I am also not alone.
That was a powerful piece…. tonight I will be on TV with my partner and grandson talking about being a gay parent and grandfather in a small bigoted part of the world… tomorrow I will enter the lions den of a talk show to do the same again……my boots will be brown, and modest; my outrage will be bright and pink.
Thank you so much for the compliment. Good luck on TV.
Thank you. I feel your anger with you and it is starting to wear it self gently on my face.
I don’t intend to have grandchildren as I don’t really like children- so I’ll ignore that question. I know how people love my facetious nature.
Anyway, on the marriage issue… I personally agree that it has masked the real issue of homophobia, but we also have to keep in mind that the enemies are still the same.
The anti-gay crowd is the anti-gay crowd whether they want us burnt on the stake or want to stop any form of gay unions. The most unfortunate aspect of the current debate is that they can hide by saying things like they oppose the ‘use of the word marriage’, when what they say in private is that we should be rounded up or wholly marginalized from society.
You question morality of men as if it were a choice they are able to make out of their free will. If we were, for the sake of this argument, to subscribe to the Judeo-Christian philosophy, this philosophy postulates that we were given free will and must act upon it as per the guidelines proffered in the respective books. In my opinion, we were no more able to pull ourselves up by the straps of our boots out of the primordial pool of inequity, than we are now, able to exercise good moral judgment or assign labels to people. Total morality assumes that we are all the same, as human species, and must abide by the same rules of how we treat one another, thus you are angry at the moral judgments that people around you make; you are right to feel this way but you are giving way too much credence to the pony-tailed cretins, sitting next to you in in posh restaurants.
Not dissimilar to humans, botanical facts about trees describe the fruit, leaves, flowers, etc. that grow on each tree. We can predict what type of fruit will grow on each tree – so too various types of people (if we agree that people can be classified into types) will act in accordance to their values, based on what we have compiled about their characteristics so far. In the ideal world, morality would be universal: your neighbor would know not to park next to your gate, the pink shoes would not be testament to one’s sexual orientation, and it wouldn’t be less of a crime to kill a prostitute or a gay person.
Universality of morals would be dangerous and detrimental to higher men as we are so different in so many ways; it wouldn’t be an issue if we were similar but because we are different, universal morality is necessarily harmful to some. We are being boxed into Victorian morality where decadence is deemed less than moral, and you, being a decadent man, are at the receiving end of all that isn’t good with our society. When a decadent man rises to the top, it is done at the expense of the morons you encounter every day. They know it: they know that they are base and so are their emotions and feelings, and the only thing left for them to do, is to bludgeon the opposition; burn books, put people in gas chambers, beat gays to death, etc. etc. etc.
Nothing stands more menacing in the way of great men and women than what we perceive as morality.