I didn't "walk away" from anything.

As someone who doesn’t go to church or claim to be a member of any particular denomination or religion, I find the whole idea that I’ve “walked away” from anyone’s god to be more than a little precious. I didn’t walk away from anything. I recognized truth is larger than anyone’s dogma, and I don’t want to cut myself off from what I might learn today and in the future by pretending I already know everything I need to know.

Aunt Garnet

I used to have an Aunt Garnet. I started thinking about her earlier because something she once said popped into my mind. When I was about ten years old, she and her family--her husband, three of our four children, their spouses and her five-year-old granddaughter--came for a visit. To be honest, I always hated when they visited. The women in the family used excessive amounts of hairspray, and Aunt Garnet was the worst. She had tight, curly helmet hair that would not have moved if she had stood outside during a hurricane. And the men used that thick, greasy hair gel popular back in the ’50s. Our little house stank of their hair care products all while they were there, and for hours after they left. Hair care products and cigarette smoke because Garnet was a chain smoker. But if they were happier, nicer people, I guess I wouldn’t have minded the smell so much. Aunt Garnet was especially unpleasant. She was always angry every time she visited. She would sit in our living room and fuss, and complain and cuss. And she was always promising to swear out an arrest warrant on the latest person who had done her wrong.

During this particular visit, she decided she wanted something from her daughter Charlotte’s purse, but since Charlotte was out of the room, she simply retrieved the purse herself and started rummaging through it. Her granddaughter objected to this. Sandy said her mother didn’t like for people to go through her purse. Aunt Garnet stared at Sandy with her angry, hard eyes and said, “I’m not afraid of your mother.” She had obviously stumped Sandy with that one. You could tell that she realized that something wasn’t quite right about what her grandmother had said, but she was too young to put it together. Charlotte obviously deserved her privacy no matter if anyone feared her or not. But Aunt Garnet lived in a rough, dog eat dog kind of world, and such niceties where never even considered. She was going to make sure her family knew who was the boss of them, and if she wanted something from her daughter’s purse, she was going to get it.

Aunt Garnet became an unwed mother back in the ‘40s, and she refused to tell anyone the name of the father of her son Tommy. As far as I know, that was a secret she took to her grave. She did manage to find a man who was willing to marry her, but he never showed any affection for Tommy.

Uncle Kiefer was a coalminer, and he, Aunt Garnet and their kids lived in a decrepit little coal company house right beside the train tracks near Charleston, West Virginia. There was a chemical plant just a few miles up the road, and the horrible smell it emitted was so strange and unearthly it simply can’t be described. This smell was so pungent it actually left a sour taste in your mouth. And the coal trains left everything in Aunt Garnet’s yard covered in oily black coal dust.

Aunt Garnet would become highly upset and call up my mother, who wasn’t exactly the most stable person around, and cuss her out if she didn’t visit regularly, so every other Sunday, Garnet and company would come to our house, or we would go to hers. And if there was anything worse than having Aunt Garnet come for a visit, it was going to visit her. Dad had to park the car on the side of a busy highway, and we had to dart across traffic and hope that we wouldn’t be run over by a coal truck or a chemical tanker. Then we had to descend a very steep set of stairs with a rickety handrail. And once we were inside, Aunt Garnet would insist on proudly displaying her stash of groceries. She always had a freezer full of meat and her cabinets were filled with staples. She seemed to buy everything in bulk. And she cooked like it was Thanksgiving every day. As a result, half the people in her family were quite large. But Aunt Garnet was always skin and bones. I didn’t find out the reason for this until I was in my thirties. I was talking about Aunt Garnet with my mother one day, and I asked her if she had some kind of disease that kept her so thin, and mother explained that Aunt Garnet had been a rather large woman when she was young, so she started throwing up after her meals in order to keep her weight down. Aunt Garnet had bulimia.

As if visiting this hellish place and being around this unhappy, angry woman wasn’t bad enough, going to the bathroom at Aunt Garnet’s house was quite an ordeal in and of itself. She always had about five or six ill-behaved little dogs who barked constantly, probably because she kept them locked in her bathroom. I was always warned not to touch them when I went in there or they’d bite. So I stood terrified at the toilet and did my business as these dogs yapped at my feet. And the smell of that bathroom….dog shit and piss, hair care products, cigarettes, coal dust, and chemicals.

All of Aunt Garnet’s children are now dead. Not one lived to be sixty. Her youngest son was the first to go. He died when he was still a teenager. He was born developmentally disabled. When he was about two, Aunt Garnet followed a doctor’s advise and placed him in a long term treatment facility near the Ohio border. About twice a year, Aunt Garnet would insist that we all go with her to see Billy who never learned to talk or walk. Aunt Garnet used to rock him like he was a little baby even after he grew up. He died in her arms from a heart attack when he was about sixteen. Tommy died of testicular cancer, and Garnet’s other son Dale died of a stroke. Charlotte became addicted to tranquilizers and ended up killing herself. Then about a year later, Charlotte’s husband committed suicide by turning on the gas in his apartment. A spark caused the entire apartment building to explode. Thankfully no one else died.

Sandy became an unwed teenage mother like her grandmother. She had her son when she was about fifteen, and when he became a teenager, he started getting into trouble with the law. So the whole ugly cycle is repeating itself.

Aunt Garnet herself died of cancer about twenty years ago. I wish I could say that I miss her, but I don’t. I did love her in a way, and I felt her pain. I now know that she most likely had bipolar disorder. When she wasn’t cussing and fuming, she took to her bed and stayed there for weeks. Uncle Kiefer was still alive when I left West Virginia five years ago, but he had developed Alzheimer’s. Just the memory of these sad people is oppressive, and I’m thankful I’ll never have to be around them again.

I’m sure it was easy for many to judge them, to simply look at them and dismiss them as redneck, hillbilly trash. But I saw it all up close over a number of years, and I know that not even an entire crew of the best psychologists the world has ever produced could have unraveled the complex pathology spreading out through that family. It was the result of generations of crushing poverty, an absence of hope, little education, poor healthcare and poor nutrition and a deeply engrained belief that they were stuck at the bottom. They believed the world was a nasty and mean place and that they were born to lose.

Patriarchy Is Bad News For All Of Us

In my opinion, criticism of patriarchy at its best should not be an attack on men. As we all know, women can and sometimes do commit atrocities, and of course they can and often are cruel, selfish, underhanded… Even though it is usually the men who commit violent acts, women often foster and support war and bloodshed.

It is true that women have suffered the most under patriarchy. They have often been precluded from leadership, denied education, discouraged from making contributions in the arts and sciences, their opinions have often been undervalued, and in a world where men have been trained to think of themselves as entitled, women have been the targets of physical and sexual abuse.

But even though it’s true that men have generally benefited from the perks of patriarchy, they, too, have been harmed by it. An untold number of men who have not been able to measure up to expectations placed on them as men have experienced scorn, ridicule, ostracism, physical and sexual abuse and even murder. And most men in patriarchal societies where people are expected to conform to rigid gender roles based on sex have had to suppress aspects of their personalities in order to avoid being seen as weak, which would be an invitation for abuse. Intimacy and authenticity are difficult in such a situation.

Patriarchal societies are extremely unsuited for LGBT people, of course. By their very nature, it is especially difficult for them to conform to rigid patriarchal gender roles.  And in a modern technological, post-industrial society, patriarchy is impractical.

When we reevaluate the structure of our society and the expectations we place on our citizens, I don’t think it’s very helpful when we allow the discussion to degenerate into a debate about who is more noble, those who have penises or those who have vaginas. We are all human, and from what I can tell, that means we’re all, to some degree, crazy as hell.

Holiday Confession

In May 2002, I finally managed to get a computer. It took me a while to get the hang of it because there wasn’t anyone around to explain how the thing worked. Those first couple of weeks were pretty stressful, and more than once I felt like giving up and throwing the damn thing out the window. But I eventually figured it out well enough to get me going. And by June, I had discovered chat rooms. Most of the ones I stumbled across were high volume places, and the quality of the discourse was extremely low. I mostly observed for a couple of minutes, read a few comments, and moved on. But one day, I found a link to an unusually quiet, low key place. It only had about 20 regular users, and generally no more than five were in there at any given time. And the primary purpose was chat, not sex. The men actually talked to each other about everyday events—work, dinner, movies… I started dropping in regularly, and after a few days, I began contributing to the conversations. The guys treated me with casual indifference at first. They were used to people popping in for a few minutes and then disappearing forever. But once they knew I was interested in joining their group, they gladly began treating me like one of the boys.

Back then, the internet was new to me, and I had heard some wild and crazy stories about deranged stalkers lurking in every corner patiently waiting to gather enough personal information about an unsuspecting individual in order to use it to track and then pounce. I was afraid, so I didn’t give these guys my real name, and I was vague about where I was from. I also lied about my age. I was thirty-six at the time, but I told them I was twenty-two. Of course, that lie was more about my vanity than fear, but I figured I’d never meet these guys, and I assumed that any relationship one formed on the internet would be purely superficial. I wasn’t aware that you could actually get to know someone, really get to know them, and form lasting bonds on the internet.

Well, I quickly realized my mistake when I started to became especially close to one of the men who frequented this chat room. We soon began exchanging emails and communicating via private chat and instant messages. Conner told me he was a twenty-two-year-old boy from Tennessee, a recent college graduate who had to put his dream of becoming an engineer on hold because he now had the responsibility of running a farm which had been in his family since before the Civil War. And this was, according to him, because his parents recently died. First his father from a heart attack, and then his mother from cancer. He said they died the same year, just a few months apart. And since then, he had been struggling to keep the farm afloat.

After a few weeks, I just couldn’t stand hiding behind my mask any longer, and I confessed everything. I told him my real name, exactly where I lived, and I told him I was 36, not 22. I expected a good telling off and a goodbye. I figured that’s what I deserved. But I was forgiven. I was so grateful to be forgiven.

The next several months were utterly magical. I had figured out I was gay when I was eleven, but I didn’t share this information with anyone until I went away to college years later. All through high school, I mooned over various boys I knew, and I had huge crushes on several actors, including C. Thomas Howell who played Ponyboy in the movie The Outsiders. But I kept it all inside, so high school was a lonely time for me. At first, I was ecstatic when I went to college and discovered the local gay community. I went to the gay bar nearly every weekend. But the boys I met were so afraid of being outed, and I was pretty shy and retiring myself, so the few encounters I had didn’t lead to much. I made a few friends, but I didn’t find a boyfriend. I worked at the Dean of Students Office, and there I met and fell in love with a young straight man. For a year, we were close and spent a lot of time together. It was the nearest thing to a real relationship I ever had, but we never so much as kissed, and I dared not reveal the depths of my true feelings for fear of ruining our special friendship. I believed I had the moon, so I didn’t think to ask for the stars. But he graduated, moved away, got married and became a father. My mental health deteriorated and I became withdrawn. I all but stopped meeting new people and making new friends. Then after my head surgeries when I was 31, I moved back in with my parents who were living in the little, conservative town of Fayetteville, West Virginia, at the time. So when I met Conner online, and we started to get close, I thought he was the boy I had been waiting for since I was fifteen. I thought finally, at long last, I had found my beautiful, sweet young prince.

Of course, I worried that I was too old and broken down for him. I told him about my mental health history and my surgeries. I told him I wasn’t a looker. But he told me he didn’t care. I worried that he still had some wild oats to sow. Conner came from a conservative family, and he said he never came out to his parents or anyone in town. He claimed he did have a boyfriend for a time in college, but that had been over for some time. I told him that if he wanted to, he should go to a gay bar in nearby Nashville. In fact, I encouraged him to do this. We weren’t exactly together, not yet, and I hated the idea of a twenty-two-year-old closet case orphan spending his Saturday nights alone in a big antebellum home that had seen better days. I wanted him to enjoy his youth. I figured if he met someone else, we weren’t meant to be together anyway. But Conner told me that he wasn’t interested in going to gay bars or having sex with strangers.

We talked for one or two hours every night for months, and sometimes we exchanged long emails filled with sweet attestations of love and admiration. But then the weekend before Thanksgiving, I got a rather disturbing email from Conner. He told me that there had been a death in the family, and he wouldn’t be online for a while. He also told me that there was some things about himself that I didn’t know, and that he would explain it all when he got back.

I couldn’t stand not knowing what he was talking about, and I missed him so much that I could hardly function. So I used my new internet skills to do a little snooping. Conner had told me that his farmhouse was on the Register of National Historic Places, and he told me the name of the farmhouse. I guess he was so proud of this farmhouse that he couldn’t bear to lie about it, so I was able to find it on the register, and according to it, the farm also went by the last name of its present owners. With that name in mind, I combed the obituaries of nearby communities, and I quickly found that an elderly man with that last name had recently died. He was survived by a wife and two sons, both in their fifties, one was unmarried. I was devastated. The person I thought existed, this person who seemed like a gift too good to be true, this boy I had hoped for since I was a teenager, this boy I allowed myself to believe in was in fact a phantom. I became horribly depressed, and when I was alone in my room, I cried like I had never cried before in my life. I wanted this twenty-two-year-old orphaned farm boy to be real. I allowed myself to need him. I thought he needed me. And I imagined that one day soon we’d be together.

When Conner showed up online ten days later, he confessed everything. His real name wasn’t Conner. He was named after his father, and he had went by the nickname Chip his whole life. He was fifty-three, thankfully, he was the son who was unmarried, he worked at an engineering firm—the work on the farm was handled by a hired man—and obviously he wasn’t an orphan. He had lost his father just the week before, and his mother was still very much alive. He, in fact, lived with her.

I tried to be as comforting as I could given his recent loss, but I made it clear that my feelings were all mixed up. However, I didn’t want to throw our friendship away. When I asked him why he lied, and for so long, he said he was afraid, and he told me he wanted to make believe that he hadn’t spent the last thirty years of his life alone. I could relate, and I forgave him. I went on mourning for Conner. In fact I still mourn for Conner. But I accepted Chip as a friend. I insisted that he give me his mailing address, which he did, and that Christmas, I sent him a batch of cookies that I baked myself.

It was as though we started fresh, and in time we were once again talking about one day living together. I was looking after my parents and he was looking after his mother, but there would come a time when we would be free, and we decided it would be nice to have a companion. I imagined that at some point in the future, we’d move someplace more accepting, maybe someplace in New England, get a little house and live openly as an old married couple.

This new dream lasted for two years. In the interim, my father had another heart attack, my grandfather died, and my mother died. Believing that I had something to look forward to gave me strength as I watched my family fall apart. I was no longer afraid of ending up homeless and alone.

In the fall of 2004, I went on vacation with my sister, and she took some photos of me. Since I had started dieting and walking back when I thought a twenty-two-year-old farm boy was interested in me, I had by that time lost a great deal of weight. I was proud of what I had accomplished, and I sent Chip some copies of the photos. His attitude toward me immediately changed. We continued our nightly chats, but all traces of his romantic interest in me evaporated. He stopped calling me sweetie, he no longer spoke of wanting to kiss me or hold me, and he no longer had an interest in virtual intimacy. I pressed him, but he gave excuses at first, and then around Christmas he confessed that he just wasn’t attracted to me. My heart was broken, again.

Of course, I was angry. I wanted to scream at him for hurting me so much. And I did let him know that he had let me down. But I knew you can’t make someone love you. You can’t demand that of a person. So it was what it was. And I still cared for him as a friend. I still needed him to be my friend.

We carried on for a long time. Our dream of living together as a romantic couple vanished, but it was soon replaced by the idea that maybe one day we’d be roommates. However, that idea eventually faded away, too. And then two years ago our chats became less frequent, and then he stopped communicating with me altogether. I sent him a card last Christmas, but he didn’t send one in reply. This year I didn’t bother.

My wounds are not fresh, and I am getting by. But I fear that all the setbacks, disappointments and deferred dreams of the past thirty years have robbed me of something very important: hope. I got through high school because I looked forward to college. Then in college, I hoped I’d one day have a home and someone special in my life. Then after I became disabled, I hoped I’d one day become a published writer. Then after my surgeries and I met Chip, I imagined that I’d one day live with him. I held onto the idea that no matter how bad things got today, there was always something to look forward to. But now I suspect that my best days are behind me.

I’m not bitter or angry. And I know that if I had just tried a little harder, if I just found a little more courage, things may have worked out differently for me. I can’t really blame anyone. And who knows, maybe a couple of my dreams will come true after all. I’m just no longer expecting them to come true, but maybe that’s a good thing. This is something I wanted to own up to because I’ve never really dealt with it, and it’s something that’s embarrassed me. It seems so foolish now looking back on it that I allowed myself to believe something so ephemeral, so tenuous. But I guess I’m not the only fool around, and there are worse things.

This is a picture of me taken in the fall of 2004.  I had just turned 39 a few weeks before.

Are LGBT Lives Worth Fighting For?

It's funny how it's okay for young people to join the military to defend their country, it's okay for home owners to defend against invasion, it's okay for parents to defend their children, but if you say you’re prepared to use deadly force if necessary to defend an LGBT person--or that you hope you’re prepared, or hope someone is prepared if necessary--you're some kind of crazy, dangerous radical.... Even many LGBT people think this way. Rather than indicating how peace loving LGBT are, I suspect this attitude indicates that many of us buy into the idea that our lives just aren’t worth defending and that those who attack us--even though we think they’re wrong and unjust--are somehow still more important than we are.

If it comes down to me or someone from my tribe and a homophobe, I'm going to go with me and my tribe. Or at least I hope I would. If I don't, then that probably means I got clipped before I had a chance to react or in that instance I proved to be a coward. Having been a coward in many ways a number of times over the years, I know that cowardice isn't noble.

Mental Health

Like a lot of people here in the U.S. and around the world, I have been reading about what happened in Newtown last week. I’ve read a few of the comments that accompany various articles, too, and it seems there’s a great deal of anger directed toward Adam Lanza’s mother. Like many, I wonder why she kept such deadly weapons in her house. But aside from the gun control issue, it seems some are under the impression that Nancy Lanza could have done more to help her son with whatever difficulties he was having. Since very little is known about what went on with the Lanza family in the last few weeks, it’s hard to say what more Mrs. Lanza could have done--aside from not keeping all those deadly weapons around.

I’ve had mental health issues most of my life, and my mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. So, for what it’s worth, I wanted to share a few thoughts about mental health and the mental health care system.

If you have a mildly autistic son who has serious trouble making friends and relating to others, it’s not like you can simply call up the Son Fixit Team on the phone, explain your problem and they’ll send a crew over to straighten things out.

You might hear a lot of propaganda about how mental illness is very treatable, and in many instances it is treatable. But most of the mental health care system is geared toward helping highly functional people deal with the vagaries of everyday life. Those people usually do get better. Many of them may even get better without treatment. But then there are others…

Back in my twenties, I was in the hospital for suicidal depression a few times, and I was in a number of group therapy sessions. I can remember one session in particular that will help illustrate my point. We were all gathered together in the ward’s day room. There was about twenty of us, aside from the therapist and a nurse. The therapist asked us all in turn to give a brief statement concerning who we were and why we were in the hospital. There were a few mothers there who were experiencing depression. A couple of them were survivors of childhood abuse. A middle aged man spoke of having anger issues. He recently divorced, and he revealed his father used to beat him. There was a teenage boy just out of high school who wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life. His parents were pressuring him because he seemed directionless. There was a young woman who was being abused by her boyfriend. And then there was a man of about sixty who turned in his chair, got up on his knees, rocked back and forth, and stared at the wall while the rest of us shared our stories. When the therapist asked him why he was in the hospital, he simply said, “I don’t know.” There is no magic pill for people like this, no magic treatment or process.

There was a time when acutely ill people were often institutionalized for years at a time, but most long-term treatment facilities are closed. They started shutting down places like that over fifty years ago. They were scary places where patients were often abused, and when antipsychotic medications were available, most of the patients were sent home. The plan was to built community daycare centers for the seriously ill. But those centers never materialized. It’s now primarily up to loved ones to look after people with serious mental health issues. And the pills…they’re not a cure, they don’t alleviate all symptoms, and the side effects can be extremely harsh.

It should also be noted that you can’t force treatment on an adult in this country unless they have been committed. Even if the person who needs treatment is your son living in your house. If he’s over the age of 18, then he has the legal right to refuse treatment. And it is very difficult to get someone committed. Even if a patient has a long history of mental health issues, even if they’ve been diagnosed with an incurable psychiatric disorder, it’s still difficult. A judge has to declare that a person is a danger to him/herself or others before the judge will commit. The judge sees the patient for no more than a few minutes, and most can hold it together for at least that long. When a patient can’t remain calm and coherent while speaking to a judge, the patient is pretty far gone. So families with a seriously ill loved one often have to deal with the situation on their own.

Another important thing to remember is that most mentally ill people are not violent. Some have a history of violence, and when the thought process is impaired, there is always the potential of violence, but most have never been violence and never will be violent. That man in the hospital with me, the one who preferred to stare at the wall than look at us during our group therapy session, he was a very lovable man. He was crazy as hell, but lovable. My mother was committed a number of times while she was alive, and when she was in the hospital, she was placed in the locked ward for acutely ill patients. I would visit her while she was in the hospital, of course, and I was never hugged and kissed more than when I was among all those seriously ill mental patients.

So what should we do? This is a very complicated issue, and I don’t have all the answers, but for one thing, I think it should be easier for family members to put a loved one in the hospital if they need to be in the hospital, even if the loved one doesn’t want to go. Of course we need to be aware that sometimes family members can try to commit a loved one for questionable reasons. In the past when it was easier to commit someone it happened all the time. Governments have been known to abuse the commitment process to get rid of dissidents. We need to protect civil liberties. But we also have to accept the fact that some of our citizens are not capable of deciding for themselves if they need treatment, and we shouldn’t make them wait until they’re running down the street naked throwing rocks through neighbors’ windows before we decide it’s time to overrule their objection to treatment. We need better treatments. We need more research. We need community support. Maybe assisted living facilities specifically for people with mental illness. And we need greater awareness of mental illness so that there’s less stigma.

Scalia unqualified to be one of the deciding voices regarding marriage equality in this country

Laws are blunt instruments. They aren’t subtle, and where we draw the line, and the distinctions we make are often arbitrary. For instance, we allow people to vote at the age of 18 because we recognize that you should have a certain level of maturity and experience before being allowed to participate in the democratic process. But why specifically 18? Why not 17 or 19? Why not 17 and a half? Why not 18 and three months?

In a democratic society, those lines are under constant review. We fuss and ruminate and discuss and debate day after day and year after year. We push the lines this way and that, and we often rely on judges to make certain decisions for us. But we hope that they use wisdom, and we hope that they try to maintain some kind of objectivity. They are, in a sense, professional decision makers.

When Scalia repeatedly brings up things like murder and bestiality in relation to homosexuality, it is obvious to me that he isn’t even trying to be objective, and his comments suggest to me that he is attempting to justify his prejudices, not keep them at arm’s length for the sake of honest reflection.

The man is a homophobic bigot. He wears his hate on his sleeve. And he calls it his morality. He makes it pretty clear he doesn’t believe he has to even consider anyone else’s perspective, least of all LGBT Americans, or their friends, or loved ones or allies. In my view, he is singularly unqualified to be one of the deciding voices regarding marriage equality in this country.

I'm not interesting in fearing you or your nasty, cruel god, Mike Huckabee

Over the years I have heard a number of so-called Christians warn that their god will harm us if don’t accept their beliefs. After 9/11, Jerry Falwell claimed LGBT people, among others, were to blame for the attack because we dared to live according to our own lights rather than his which he arrogantly insisted were divinely inspired and beyond dispute. Anne Graham Lotz, Billy Graham’s daughter, warned the people of North Carolina that they had better vote for that state’s Hate On The Gays constitutional amendment or her god would hurt them. Yesterday Bryan Fischer claimed that his god allowed twenty young children to die because the school they attended didn’t teach his brand of Christianist theology. This reminds me of the film The Rapture (1991) which is about a woman who rejects God and eternity in Heaven because she has come to the realization that any god who would torture and harm people for not accepting a certain set of beliefs is not deserving of her worship. The film is a repudiation of Christianist dogma and demonstrates just how cruel and nasty the Christianist god really is. If your god would allow terrorists to fly planes into buildings and madmen to murder small children because a number of people haven’t sifted through the mystery and vagaries of life, found the Christian Bible, read it, interpreted it “correctly”, and come to believe all the supposed “right things”, then you and your god can hit the road. I don’t want to believe in a god like that. And as for Mike Huckabee’s argument that people do bad things because they have not been taught by public schools to believe his god will hold them accountable…just look at all the awful things Christians have done in the name of their religion. The idea that Christianists like Mike Huckabee are saintly and would never harm a fly because they fear their god will punish them is laughable. They merely find biblical excuses for their hate and carry out their carnage with the arrogance that their god approves of what they’re doing. Huckabee’s pursuit of a theocratic America where everyone who doesn’t agree with him will be marginalized is a case in point.

Aunt Jenny

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s fun playing dress up, but you mostly do it alone in your room because you know from experience that most don’t understand. You especially like to wear your mom’s old coat with the fur collar, and with it on, you invent a character that is based loosely on Aunt Jenny…your mother’s sister, the one who has become a boozy old flirt. You just adore Aunt Jenny. She’s gone through four husbands, but she made sure each one left her a little money. She’s alone now, so she’s free to spend most of her time traveling. She stays in nice hotels, sleeps in, and shops or goes sightseeing in the afternoons. Then in the evenings, she sips overpriced cocktails in upscale bars. She always manages to find someone to talk to. Since she is financially secure, she has lately turned her sights on younger men. She likes to impress them by buying them expensive little trinkets. She builds up their fragile egos by telling them that they are men of quality who will surely make their mark. They invariably reward her with an abundance of gratitude. You know that Aunt Jenny has her sorrows, but she’s one of your heroes anyway, and that’s because she has lived her life on her own terms. She ignores the criticism and condescending remarks and does exactly what she wants, and she always does it with style. You want to be just a little bit like her.



That Look

Ah, that look filled with desire and mixed with a significant dose of fear… The look that says, “I want it, I want it so bad, but please don’t hurt me.” Ah, that look! It makes me wish I was a superhero. If only I could be the one to swoop in and fulfill all of his animal lusts while at the same time looking after him and taking care of him with affection. I want it to be as wild and unrestrained as he needs it to be while holding him safely in my arms. I want to give him the impossible…the chance to dive into savagery without getting a scratch on him.

They Really Are Like That

I would like to make a documentary filled with revealing quotes from Christianists, one after the other, along with information about how the Republican Party is so closely tied with Christiansts that they have become the tail that wags the dog. And I would add information about how church affiliation is dropping off, and how young people have come to associate homophobia with Christianity. But mostly it would be awful, jaw-dropping quotes--some printed, some video clips--coming at you very quickly…an avalanche of hate. I think a lot of moderate and liberal Christians don’t pay much attention to Christianists, and when they do, many make excuses for them. “They mean well.” “They’re not really like that.” “They just don’t understand. Give them some time.” I would like for these moderate and liberal Christians to walk away knowing that they do not mean well, they really are like that, and they don’t want to understand.