In an alternate universe, I am about to graduate from high school, and this will be my prom date.

In an alternate universe, I am about to graduate from high school, and this will be my prom date. We’ll go in his older brother’s pickup, and we’ll stay out all night talking about our plans for the future. By the time the morning sun illuminates the rising fog, we will have made a great many important decisions. We’re going to hike the Appalachian Trail in the summer, we’ll go to college, we’ll travel, become school teachers, get married, buy a nice little house and when we’re about 25 or so, we’ll think about having kids of our own.

Every time I kiss him, I'll remember the way he looked in his white suit the night we decided to spend the rest of our lives together.

Waiting For The Inevitable

Under The Volcano (1984) is based on the highly acclaimed novel of the same name by Malcolm Lowry. Albert Finney played the lead character Geoffrey Firmin. Geoffrey was a man of some means who used to have a successful career as an English diplomat. He was once close to his half-brother Hugh, played by Anthony Andrews. And he used to be married to a beautiful woman named Yvonne, played by Jacqueline Bisset.

When the story opens, we find Geoffrey living in a small village in Mexico on the eve of WWII. He had been working there as a diplomat, but he quit. Geoffrey is aware that the world is about to be plunged into chaos despite all the best efforts of people such as himself, so he has given up. The turmoil that looms over Europe, much like the volcano that looms over the village, reflects the turmoil in Geoffrey’s personal life. At some point in the recent past, Geoffrey discovered that his wife Yvonne and his half-brother Hugh were having an affair, and although it seems to have only been short-lived and that Yvonne and Geoffrey were truly in love, Geoffrey couldn’t bring himself to forgive them, so he and Yvonne divorced, and Hugh went off to fight the Fascists in Spain. But Hugh returns, followed by Yvonne as the Mexican villagers celebrate the Day of the Dead. There seems to be a chance for the three to make peace with what happened and to become a family again, but even though Geoffrey wants this more than anything, he has lost his faith and he has become a hopeless alcoholic. Geoffrey no longer believes in happy endings. He no longer believes that hard work or the best intentions pay off. Geoffrey has come to believe that we all live under the volcano and it’s only a matter of time before we’ll be destroyed. So he drinks himself into a stupor, behaves erratically, and at the end of the film, he is killed by thuggish Nazi sympathizers.

While watching this film, I couldn’t help but think of Trayvon Marin, the young man who was gunned down in the streets while walking home after buying himself a treat at a local store. He was shot by a paranoid lunatic whom our society believes has a right to not only own a gun but to carry it around. And the state of Florida has seen fit to provide such paranoid lunatics with a law that protects them from prosecution when they kill with their guns if they merely feel threatened.

I also thought of the story I read recently about a man who grew up in Morocco. He was an effeminate boy, and because of this, the men who knew him felt it was their right to rape him once he reached puberty. Not even his family was willing to stand up for him. And I’m sure the men rationalized their actions by telling themselves that if the boy didn’t want it, he wouldn’t have been effeminate. Morocco is the country where Matthew Sheppard was gang rapped when he visited the country as a teenager. How can the idea that it’s okay to rape small, effeminate teenage boys get passed down in a society from one generation to the next without that idea being challenged? How can these men who brutalize these boys not realize that what they’re doing is wrong?

As much as I want to believe that people are basically good and that life is beautiful, I often find myself sympathizing with Geoffrey’s point of view. We can put forth our best diplomatic efforts, as Geoffrey did before he gave up, and maybe we’ll see some positive change here and there, but it’s like trying to hold back the flow of lava with a soup ladle. With every small victory comes the news chaos and destruction have popped up somewhere else.

I suppose that despite this, one can try to live as if all is not lost. And maybe this can give a person’s life meaning and purpose. Most of the time I manage to believe this on some level, but like Geoffrey, I often find myself in full retreat, too. I may not be a drunkard, and it’s not like me to go out in the world and pick fights with thugs, but I do hide in my little cave, and at least once a day I find myself waiting for the inevitable.

Under The Volcano trailer

A Boy to Be Sacrificed

Sniffing The Glue Of Bigotry

Human beings have a great capacity for love and compassion, and they also have a great capacity for egotism. Most of us are guilty of wanting to believe that we’re better than others in some way from time to time--smarter, more attractive, richer, more charming, funnier, more influential, cooler, better educated, more moral… There seems to be only a hair’s breadth between having a healthy self-esteem and being arrogant. When it comes to maligned minorities--the poor, those who aren’t white, women, those considered less attractive, LGBTs, etc.--there are a host of hostile clichés ready to be pulled off the shelf and hurled at a convenient victim if a person is in the mood to feel superior. Bigotry is a bad habit. It gives you a momentary high, but you have to cut yourself off from your natural love and compassion for the person or people you’re attacking.

For many, simply getting to know a few LGBT people is enough. The love and compassion for the real people they know overtakes those hostile clichés for a nameless, faceless mass of homos. For others, just a little bit of common sense and logic will do. But there are some who are going to fight like hell to hold onto their bigotry because they have grown addicted to sniffing that glue. They feel superior, and they want to go on feeling superior. NOM is so driven by bigotry that they have actually made this one of their talking points. They actually think this is a valid and persuasive argument. “We can’t let LGBT people win, because if they won, we would lose, and, as a result, some might think of us as bigots.”

US man arrested on gay Caribbean cruise says he and partner taunted, humiliated in Dominica

US man arrested on gay Caribbean cruise says he and partner taunted, humiliated in Dominica

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When I first heard about this story I was concerned that the men might have been arrested on trumped-up charges. But I’ll admit that when I read the account from the cruise line, I assumed that the men were guilty of having sex on their balcony. I didn’t have any hostility toward them. I thought that maybe it had just been a thrill for them to have sex on the balcony. And since they were apparently safe after spending only one night in jail and paying a moderate fine, I thought the whole thing was much ado about nothing.

But after reading the statement from these men, I realized that I wasn’t there, I don’t know what happened, and their story is at least plausible. Maybe it was simply a matter of one or both of them exposing too much flesh on the balcony, and maybe that got the accusations of sex on the balcony started.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that the balcony in question was attached to their room. No, it is not private in the sense that no one can see onto the balcony while the ship is docked. But the men were invited to think of it as their own while they were onboard the ship. It was just a few feet away from their bed and bathroom, places were they undoubtedly felt free to be undressed. And a cruise ship is like a floating hotel, and part of the time the balcony would face open sea. It would be easy enough to step through that door onto the balcony in some state of undress to get a breath of fresh air or to check the weather and temperature without giving much thought you might offend someone if they saw your penis or butt. It would be easy enough to forget that merely seeing two gay men in some state of undress would be enough to start rumors of public sex.



My Dog Had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

We had a little dog named Bozo when I was a kid. He was a small mutt with short, light brown fur and a fan tail. He wasn’t tiny. I don’t remember picking him up and carrying him around as I did our cat, but he wasn’t very big. Bozo was a friendly, happy dog for the most part, and I loved him. But sudden, loud noises terrified Bozo--a rifle blast, a clap of thunder. One 4^th of July when I was 9 or 10, I was out in the backyard with Bozo. I was sitting on the ground Indian style, and I was petting and loving on him while he graciously accepted my attention. Out of the blue, I heard a loud pop. It turned out my father and sister decided to let off a few firecrackers in the front yard. The sound, of course, startled Bozo, and his reaction was typically extreme. He didn’t just jump, he leapt into the air. It seems he meant to fly over top of me in his intense desire to get away, but he didn’t quite make it. He ended up headbutting me. That little dog nearly knocked me out cold. Almost 40 years have passed, and I can still feel the impact of his forehead bashing against mine. It was intensely painful, and I fell backwards. Bozo was long gone by the time I stopped writhing in pain and figured out what had happened. He was such a gentle little dog, but he had to get away from that sound even if it meant killing me. The following New Year’s Eve, Bozo ran away when everyone started letting off their fireworks at the stroke of midnight, and we never saw him again. We looked for him, and we told everyone that he was missing, but it was as if he had vanished. Maybe in his terror, he ran so far away from home that he got lost. Maybe he lived as a stray for a few years after that. Maybe another family adopted him. Maybe he ran out in front of a car and got run over. I suppose I’ll never know what exactly happened to him, but I greatly missed him for a long time. Now and then I used to dream of him returning home. I continued to have that dream occasionally until I was in my twenties.

Dogs like Bozo are said to be gun-shy. I don’t know what caused Bozo to be this way. Was it just in his nature? Or was he exposed to a loud blast when he was a pup? I can’t say, but even as a kid, I realized that Bozo couldn’t help it. I readily forgave him when he almost murdered me and when he ran away and broke my heart. He was easily scared and this made him act out in irrational ways. Human beings can be like that, too, of course, except we don’t usually use the term “gun-shy” when talking about humans. There was a time when the term “shell shocked” was common. And that was followed by “battle fatigue.” I like “shell shocked” because it’s descriptive like “gun-shy” but more visceral. You can feel something of the torment of the person who suffers from shell shock just by using the term. But I suppose it was inevitable that we would settle on something much more clinical like "post traumatic stress disorder" because human beings aren’t just traumatized by loud sounds, and it’s not only the stress of war that can cause the condition.

Maybe I understood Bozo so well because on some level I related to him. I, too, was shell shocked. Loud noises didn’t unduly frighten me, but I was generally nervous and lived in a state of near panic a good deal of the time. When I was young, people said I was shy. I was scared, confused, quiet and withdrawn. Most of the time, people ignored me, but once in a while someone would became curious and ask me what I liked. I couldn’t answer. Not only did I avoid talking to people, but my inner dialogue was also stunted in a way. Looking back on it, I realize that I liked a great many things, my dog for instance, and animals in general. I loved movies. I had a love for houses, especially old, grand houses. I loved paintings and photographs. And I loved camping and being in the woods. But I couldn’t talk about these things. Not only was I reluctant to reveal myself, I didn’t even know how to put my feelings and thoughts into words. Sometimes I felt like I might be missing something crucial. I worried that I was boring, dull, that I had nothing to share. But now I realize I just hadn’t found my voice, and that’s probably because I was terrified of using it.

My parents were good people, but they lacked the skills to nurture someone like me, and they were so caught up in their own problems that they didn’t have it in them to focus on mine. My mother was seriously mentally ill, and my father lived in denial. This undoubtedly exacerbated my condition. One of the reasons I felt unsafe was because I didn’t know what to expect from my parents, and they didn’t spend a lot of time comforting or encouraging me. But there is another reason that shouldn’t be downplayed. From a very early age, I recognized I was different from most boys. And I realized that this difference wasn’t appreciated or understood by other kids or adults. So I retreated into myself. Maybe I overreacted. But like Bozo, I just can’t help it. I have spent my life trying to find someplace safe, even at the expense of forming lasting relationships and finding a home.

I’m not sure I’ll ever find that sense of safety and security that I desperately want. I don’t know if I’ll ever have a family or a place that is truly mine. Maybe at this point, I should resign myself to being a stray because as much as I want to be loved and petted, my instincts tell me not to let anyone get too close, and my instincts always win.

I hope that it will one day get better for kids who are different. I don’t want them growing up so afraid of their own voice they’re middle aged before they find it. I don’t want them so frightened of rejection that they try to be invisible. I want it generally acknowledged that some boys don’t like baseball and some girls don’t like Barbie dolls, and I want that to be okay. I want it to be okay that some girls have crushes on other girls and some boys have crushes on other boys. I get so sick and tired of hearing how trying to bring about this change is an attack on the religious liberty of Christians. We live in a world of diversity. If some think gender nonconformity and homosexuality are wrong, so what? LGBT kids are real. They exist. And they deserve to grow up feeling wanted and safe.

I also want those kids to grow up knowing that they can get married and start a family with someone they love. I want them to have that option, that dream. I want them to be able to sit in their bedrooms some rainy Saturday afternoon when they’re twelve or thirteen and think about one day having someone to come home to and kids who will ask them for the latest gadget or toy.

But of course some don’t want them to have that dream. Some want kids like the kind of kid I was to continue growing up believing that the best they can hope for is to survive in the shadows, out of sight of “real” people. They don’t want them imagining bringing their husbands and wives home for Thanksgiving dinner. They don’t want them to imagine telling the kids at school about their boyfriends or girlfriends. They don’t want them to imagine telling their friends and parents what’s in their hearts. They want them to continue to be shell shocked, afraid, ashamed.

I can only imagine what life would be like for me now if I had grown up in a nurturing environment, if I had felt wanted and protected, if I hadn’t felt the need to hide. What if my mother hadn’t held up the old purse I adopted at Sunday school when I was four or five and told everyone to look at my purse just so all the kids would laugh, and I would realize that boys aren’t supposed to carry purses? What if teachers had told me that it was okay for me to play with the girls when they saw I was intimidated by the boys? What if someone had told me that it’s okay if I didn’t like baseball, basketball or football? What if my father had shown compassion and understanding rather than scorn and disgust when he caught me naked with another boy when I was twelve? What if I had felt confident enough to tell the young man I fell for in college that I loved him?

It’s such a simple thing, accepting someone as they are.  It’s hard for me to believe that, knowing there are LGBT kids out there, some want them to continue to feel like outcasts. But there are people like that. And they offer the dumbest excuses for their unkindness. One of the dumbest is the idea that same-sex relationships can’t be held up as equal to opposite-sex relationships because straight people would no longer take commitment and marriage seriously. I just don’t believe that straight people are generally so shallow that they would stop loving their spouses and children just because they know some gay couple out there might be happily married. If someone like Brian Brown really has this problem, then he should deal with it the best way he knows how. I don’t think we should sacrifice the millions of LGBT kids in this country just because the Brian Browns of the world are insecure about their own ability and/or the ability of other straight people to remain faithful.

Another dumb reason to continue to deny LGBT kids, perhaps the dumbest of them all, is the idea that we can’t let LGBTs have equal rights because if we did, those who hold them in contempt for supposedly religious reasons would be thought of as bigots. Well, if you want to believe you’re better than someone else, and if you want to deny them basic human rights, then you are a bigot. It doesn’t matter if you’re thought of as one or not. That’s what you are.

I hope that by the time I close my eyes on this world things will be different.

Squeal Like Pigs

Focus On The Family’s Day of Dialogue is not just about conservative Christian students merely holding their heads up high and proudly expressing their views. It’s about evangelism. It’s specifically about evangelizing to LGBT students and their friends. Focus On The Family has admitted as much. I’m wondering how Christianists would react if a Muslim group started encouraging and training teenagers to evangelize the Muslim faith at school and to specifically target Christian students. My guess is that many would squeal like pigs.

Day of Dialogue=My Religion Gives Me The Right To Bully You

The Day Of Silence is all about promoting the idea that we should respect those who are different and refrain from bullying. It has nothing to do with demanding anyone go against their faith, engage in activities that they don’t want to engage in, or to keep quiet about their beliefs or opinions. We all know that teens, just like the rest of us, live in the real world, and every day they are confronted with people who do things or hold opinions that they don’t agree with or understand. Some teens drink. Some don’t. Some do drugs. Some don’t. Some have sex. Some don’t. Some are Mormon. Some are Muslim. Some think we should bomb Iran. Some don’t. Of course they’re going to talk about their differences and express their opinions. But we all know that a few can be overbearing. A few simply can’t accept that others disagree with them. The Day of Dialogue is about encouraging teens from conservative Christian homes to be overbearing, to not only speak their minds, but to be pushy about it. As the adult women in this video clearly state, this is not merely about teaching their children to express their honest opinion when doing so is appropriate. It’s about EVANGELISM. It’s about trying to snuff out the beliefs of others and replacing them with your own, and in this case it’s specifically about snuffing out the belief that being LGBT is okay. Funny how Focus On The Family singles out this issue. Presumably they think it’s wrong to be Mormon, Muslim or Jewish, but they’re not out there openly training their kids to aggressively confront peers of other faiths. No, it’s the LGBT kids and their supportive friends who are the targets of their “evangelism”. This “evangelism” is not the same as promoting respect for LGBT people, even though Candi Cushman and her Focus on the Family cohorts would have you believe that. No one is asking conservative Christian students to never express their beliefs, or to abandon their beliefs or to become LGBT. It’s about recognizing that not everyone has the same beliefs. It’s about recognizing that LGBT kids are often bullied. It’s about how it’s wrong to make someone so uncomfortable and afraid that they don’t want to be in school, or even continue living.

Who's a douchenozzle?

Using the term “douchenozzle” as a rejoinder might be rude and juvenile, but it hardly compares to telling someone they are rejected by God and doomed while implying they’re a threat to children and civilization. Anybody who doesn’t understand this is a douchenozzle. Anyone who would tell someone they are rejected by God and doomed while implying they’re a threat to children and civilization without expecting some kind of sharp retort is…well, a douchenozzle. Anyone who would claim to be the victim because they were called a “douchenozzle” after telling someone they are rejected by God and doomed while implying they’re a threat to children and civilization is a sly, self-serving, opportunistic douchenozzle.

Michael Brown is a douchenozzle. 

Book Of Revelation: 'Visions, Prophecy And Politics'

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In her new book Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Princeton University religious professor Elaine Pagels places the Book of Revelation in its historical context and explores where the book's apocalyptic vision of the end of the world comes from.

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Fascinating interview. I was first introduced to Dr. Pagels’ work more than twenty years ago when I was studying religion and philosophy at WVU. One of my religious studies professors said that Pagels posed an important question to modern Christianity--is orthodox Christianity complete, or have significant, even crucial elements been forgotten? I was reminded of that as I listened to her speak of how virtually anyone who reads the Book of Revelation in a literal way can cast themselves as being one of the “good guys” and those who oppose them as demonic, and how this is a dangerous way of viewing human conflict. If both sides in a dispute view themselves as absolutely right, then there is little chance of peaceful resolution.

Toward the end of the interview, she went on to talk about how she outgrew her teenage flirtation with evangelical Christianity. She explained how there is a certain draw to seeing yourself as belonging to a group of “good people” and thinking that the nameless, faceless masses outside the gates represent dark forces, and how there’s a certain draw to thinking you have joined a group that has absolute answers to fundamental questions, but she realized that this way of thinking wasn’t for her when she was told that a Jewish friend was going to hell.

Finally, Dr. Pagels speaks of other books of revelation that are not included in the Christian cannon, that lie beyond orthodoxy, which do not present a good v. evil worldview that divides human beings and pushes us toward battle, but presents all of us, including beings that aren’t human, as part of a spiritual whole.

Mass Appeal (1984)

I watched Mass Appeal (1984) earlier. I guess it’s been largely forgotten. There are no clips or trailers available on YouTube, and there’s no discussion of it on IMDb. But I happen to think it’s a very good film. I first saw it over 25 years ago when it first came out, and I’ve seen it a number of times since. I used to have a copy on VHS. Jack Lemmon plays Father Farley, a priest from an apparently affluent parish. He enjoys the perks--the nice gifts, invitations to dinner, convivial conversations with educated people--and he tries to get by on charm. His housekeeper, played by Louise Latham, seems like a pious stick in the mud at first, but she proves to be a loyal friend. Charles Durning plays Monsignor Burk, a pigheaded, small-minded, homophobic jerk who rules over the local seminary as if he were an absolute monarch. Zeljko Ivanek plays Mark Dolson, a headstrong seminarian who has a history of challenging authority, the status quo, and, as we discover, used to fool around with both men and women before deciding he wanted to become a priest. Great acting all around, and the writing is good--it’s poignant but also at times very funny. Ivanek also happened to be very pleasant to look at back in the early 80’s--very slim, cute, boyish face, and, since his character was a runner, he wore short shorts in a couple of scenes which showed off his deliciously long legs.

Getting Too Big For Your Breeches

Back in the mid 90’s when I was in Chestnut Ridge Hospital, which is a psychiatric hospital, I used to share my meals in the dayroom with a woman who suffered from anorexia. As you can imagine, while I ate she mainly nibbled. Most of the patients ate downstairs in the cafeteria, but I wasn’t allowed to leave the locked ward because I was suicidal, and my dinning companion wasn’t required to eat in the cafeteria because the smell of food made her nauseous. She was a quiet, understated kind of person, so it didn’t take me long to feel comfortable enough to chat with her. I was curious about her condition, so I asked her questions about it. When did it start? When did people start noticing? How long has it been causing you problems? This woman was--or had been--a nurse and was used to answering medical questions with some precision, so she was a font of knowledge, and the topic gave me something to fall back on. I was grateful for this because I have social phobia, so small talk isn’t exactly my forte.

But one day I asked about the meal she was often served, animal crackers and skim milk. This meal struck me as rather bland, not at all something you would serve someone who had a hard time eating. This woman was starving to death and they were giving her c-rations. She explained that the meal provided sufficient protein to keep her hair from falling out, but it contained a minimum amount of calories, which was about all she could force herself to eat. I noticed a change in her expression when she explained this to me. She didn’t quite bristle. I wouldn’t go that far. But I detected that she was tired of having to explain herself, to justify the way she was. And I suspected that she wasn’t just tired of me asking questions but that she was tired of people in general feeling free to quiz her about her weight, her diet and appetite. I never brought up the topic again.

Although I was far from anorexic, I understood her sensitivity. Just about all of my life weight has been an issue. For decades I have fluctuated between being a bit chubby and being seriously obese. Strangely enough, I was rather puny between the ages of five and eight. I was sickly, and the doctor was always telling my mother that I was underweight and that I needed to eat more. My mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, which was not being treated at that time even though she was my primary caregiver, and she never went to college or had access to books on nutrition. So rather than trying to get me to eat a greater volume of healthy foods, she treated me to junk food--Hershey Bars, chocolate milk, Coke. I was never refused these things.

After I had my tonsils out, my health stabilized, and I began to gain weight. Just a little at first, but by the time I was in middle school, I was a pretty chunky kid. The fact that I was inactive compounded the problem. I had already realized that I was different from other boys, so being around them made me uncomfortable. And back then, boys and girls usually didn’t play sports together, and as a result, I grew to hate sports. I saw sports as a threat. I feared that on the playing field, in the company of all those boys, my difference would become glaringly obvious. I was terrified of exposure. So I avoided sports. In addition to that, my social phobia was quite severe. I was afraid of being away from the house because of the likelihood of having to deal with a social situation. Merely walking would mean I would run into people. And I would have to decide to either look at them or down at the ground. If they spoke to me, I would have to think of something to say. And if someone threatened me--and bullies did that fairly regularly--when I was by myself, I might have to physically defend myself. So I was pretty much a homebody with a sweet tooth who had a virtual unlimited access to goodies.

By the time I got to high school, I became concerned with my looks. There was very little chance of me finding a boyfriend or even a friend with benefits, but I had hope, at least hope for the future, so I began to watch what I ate. And much to my delight, the pounds came off. I never managed to become as thin as the boys I was most attracted to, but I was no longer fat.

When I got to college, I managed to find the more or less hidden gay community there within a few weeks, and the gay boys noticed me. Many took an interest. I discovered that all I had to do was show up at the local gay bar, sip a Coke while holding up a wall, and boys would come to me. A number of them even took me home. I was flattered by the attention, the compliments, and even the sex. But I soon discovered that quite a number of boys felt it was their duty to inform me that I was “too” chubby. Guys would buy me drinks, stroke my cheek, dance with me, tell me that my face was cute, my smile was great, my eyes beautiful, and then they would lower the boom. They’d tell me if I was just twenty pounds lighter, I would be perfect. Some would even say something along those lines after having sex with me. It was humiliating. But I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything different because I was getting the same thing from straight people, even straight guys. I was told many times in a number of ways that I would be good looking if I just lost some weight.

The thing of it is, I was already watching what I ate. I was regularly going hungry. I would go to bed with my stomach growling. And as I’ve already explained, there were reasons why I wasn’t more active. Running or going to the gym would have made me feel conspicuous. And even though I walked all over the college town of Morgantown, it wasn’t enough to burn off that spare twenty pounds.

Maybe the criticism would not have been so devastating if I hadn’t taken it to heart, but the thing of it is, I have always been wildly attracted to slim young men. Many go for the jocks, some go for big muscles, some like a hairy chest, but I went for the wispy guys, the guys who seemed a bit delicate, a bit feminine. And back when I was young, I had this unexamined, irrational notion tumbling around in the back of my head that I had to look like what I wanted.

While in college, I longed to be 120 pounds because I had learned that’s how much Michael J. Fox weighed, and like me, he was 5’4” and I thought he was cute. But that goal proved to be allusive. And not long after that, all the years of living in an abusive environment caught up with me, and my mental health deteriorated. My social anxiety, mood swings, severe depression made taking care of myself all the more difficult, so little by little, I gave up. At 18 I was about 140 pounds. By 20 I was 190. By 22 I was over 200. And by 24 I was over 240.

Over the years a lot of concerned people have talked to me about my weight. My grandmother used to give me religious tracts about how Jesus can help you lose weight. People have freely given me diet and exercise tips. Strangers have come up to me at bus stops and told me how I can lose weight. Friends have earnestly told me that they wish I would take better care of myself so that I won’t die an early death. Absolutely none of it helped. In fact it only made things worse. I was getting the same message I was getting from those boys who picked me up in the gay bar back in college: “You’re okay, but you’re not quite good enough.”

I assure you that a person almost never needs you to tell them they have a weight problem. They know. And rarely does anyone need you to advise them on how to live in a healthy way. My friend from the hospital was a nurse. She knew that she was doing damage to her health by trying to get by on animal crackers and skim milk. She knew. A lack of knowledge was not her problem. And it’s never been my problem either. Nor have I suffered from a lack of needling and goading, or a lack of shame and rejection. If you know someone who has a weight problem, I think the best thing you can do for them is to simply butt out. Accept your friend for who and what they are. If they want your advise or your support--a walking buddy, a drive to Weight Watchers--they’ll ask for it.

Back in my mid 30’s, I did manage to get my weight under control, and I kept the weight off for a number of years. I went from 310 pounds all the way down to 160. I did it all by myself. I began watching what I ate again, and I started walking. At the time, I lived in Fayetteville, WV, and the town park, the cemetery, and nature trails maintained by the National Park Service that led down into the New River Gorge were all within ten minutes of my house. Following my head surgeries, I realized I wanted to live, and there were things I wanted to do, including hiking and backpacking. In time I was able to walk three and four hours at a time. I was fit enough to go backpacking, but I was apprehensive about doing it alone.

Since moving to California, following the death of my parents, the weight has sadly come back. Merced doesn’t have any alluring places for me to walk. And I turned to food in my grief and the anxiety I felt at being alone in the world. I now realize that insecurity about money also played a significant role. I crave high calorie foods at the start of the month when my Social Security check comes in because I fear money will run out and I’ll be stuck with nothing but saltines and water by the 20^th.

I’ve not given up hope. I already know I can lose weight. I’ve done it before, so I can do it again. Maybe getting down to 120 is unrealistic, but 150 or 160, yeah, I can do that. I will do that if I live long enough.

To Be Young, Healthy and Beautiful

To Be Young, Healthy and Beautiful

A poem by Gary Cottle

Ah, to be young, healthy and beautiful.
To only have just begun your journey.
To have the support of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles.
To have homes and arms open to you where ever you go.
To have strangers smile at you with wistful gladness on learning you are 18, 19 or 20.
To have them wish you well without hesitation and offer to help you succeed if they can.
To know that you will never be in want of a date for long and that you will likely have to turn some away.
To believe you are going somewhere and that you will do good things, great things, things people will talk about.
To have the road ahead stretch out so far the end is almost unfathomable.
To be more concerned with the route than the destination, and to have insurmountable hope that your adventure will be a happy one.
To go back and have this all again without being afraid that you’re not good enough, that you’ll never measure up, that you don’t deserve the gift of being young.
To never have heard the putdowns.
To never have believed them.
To have had confidence.
To have been loved and nurtured not in spite of who you are, but because of it.
To have been told by the people who matter that you are on the right path.
To have had them not try to hold you back.
To have been allowed to make your way without shame, guilt or fear.
To have started out on that road knowing that you will be accepted.
To have been nascent with an unburdened heart.
To have been yourself from the start.

Drinking Game…

You have to take a shot every time a Christianist indicates he doesn’t know that the amount of birth control pills a woman takes is not proportional to the amount of sex she has, claims marriage equality will lead to people marrying inanimate objects, suggestions that Sharia Law has already been implemented in a small, Midwestern town, or warns that President Obama isn’t really a Christian.

Piers Morgan says Kirk Cameron was "Brave" to make antigay remarks. Brave? Really?

Piers Morgan: Kirk Cameron Was "Brave" to Make Antigay Remarks

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Would Morgan call a white supremacist brave?  Does he think Rush Limbaugh is brave?  Kirk Cameron is a Hollywood failure.  He became widely known playing a dim, ignorant young man over twenty years ago on the TV sitcom Growing Pains.  The reason Cameron could play Mike Seaver so well is because the role wasn't a stretch.  Cameron is pretty dim and ignorant himself, so most of America lost interest after his teenage cuteness wore off, but, to give the devil his due, Cameron was smart enough to milk his celebrity for all it's worth by going on to play for the Christianist crowd after his mainstream gig ran its course.  The Christianists love him, and they keep the money coming in.  So long as Cameron continues to tell them what they want to hear, they'll continue to pay for the roof over his head and the groceries in his pantry.  Cameron may very well believe the hateful nonsense he espouses, but it's hardly brave of him to preach it considering fellow haters have been rewarding him handsomely for doing just that for a couple of decades.

The question is why does Piers Morgan invite bigots like Kirk Cameron on his show and ask them to pontificate about their views on homosexuality?  Why does someone as stupid as Cameron get to have a platform to spew hate about me and people like me?  Morgan may want us to believe he's an objective interviewer who allows his guests to express all kinds of opinions about LGBTs on his show, including negative ones, even though he's okay with LGBTs himself, but it seems he's really just after ratings because he wants to hoover up the money...and LGBTs be damned. 

   

Is "The Fall" something that has outlived its usefulness, like Hell and the Devil?

I think a lot of our sex phobia, including homophobia, comes from the concept of The Fall. Augustine directly linked Original Sin with sex, but barring his theology, if you accept the idea that we live in a fallen world, then you’re likely to question that mechanism by which people come into this supposedly fallen world, even if it’s merely on a subconscious level. The concept is all around us. It’s drilled until us. We’re told the world isn’t what it should be. If you listen to someone like Rick Santorum, you get the feeling that he sees life as some kind of duty, that getting married, having sex and producing children is a chore. And the fall isn’t just a Christian concept. It’s in Plato’s writings, too, for instance.

But I’ve grown to question it. I’m sure that it still works on me in hidden ways because the idea permeates our culture, but the more I think about it, the more it doesn’t make any sense. Why would a god purposely create a punishing world and put us through the mill? I realize that according to Christian dogma, humanity is being punished for supposed wrongdoing, but I think that explanation has more to do with our need to find a reason for suffering. There is plenty of suffering in the world, at least from our vantage point. It’s easy for us to imagine a world that, to us, would be better than this one--one without war, disease, death… But if there is more to the world than meets the eye, then maybe all of the horrible things that can happen to us are part of life for reasons that have nothing to do with punishment. Maybe the world isn’t fallen at all. Maybe we’re not born sinners who are in need of saving.

I think the belief that we live in a fallen world serves to make people feel guilty and worthless, and I think it serves to make them vulnerable to flimflam artists who promise to show them a way out. I think it might also make people feel ashamed of enjoying the pleasures of the world too much. There seems to be a masochistic element that runs through all of Christian history starting with the martyrs. I’m always struck by how joyless the artwork from the Middle Ages is. The Puritans weren’t exactly a barrel of laughs. And here come gay people who want to form relationships and have sex not out of a sense of duty but for the pleasure of it. They want to take delight in their existence for its own sake and not to fulfill some purpose that is meant to be a drudgery for having the temerity of showing up in this supposedly awful place.