Star Bellied Christians

Over the years I have grown to detest the exclusionary phrase “brothers and sisters *in Christ*”. It seems to me that if the religion you practice doesn’t lead you to feel a special bond with all of life, all of humanity, the universe entire, or at least the desire to feel a special bond with all those things, then it’s really more of a snobby social club, like one of those restricted country clubs with members who think they’re classy and privileged and deserving of privilege, while those who don’t belong because they don’t want to belong or because they’re not allowed to join might be inclined to think of the members as assholes. I’ve known many Christians, and most of them aren’t this way, but there are quite a few who divide people into two classes, those who are saved--according to their dogma--and those who are not. Of course they would claim that they love everyone and they are not being exclusionary. But it’s obvious from the way they talk that they see those who are “not saved” as outsiders and those who are saved as “special” and more worthy of their concern and friendship. And the only way to become “special” in their eyes is to accept their beliefs. These are the Star Bellied Christians.

Life is a mystery.

In the series Cosmos, which originally aired on PBS in 1980, Carl Sagan explained that the universe is expanding, and he said that one of two things might happen. Matter could become so dispersed that all the magical chemical processes that produce and sustain stars and life would cease and the cosmos could become cold and dark. Or at some point the expansion could reverse itself and all the matter in the universe could revert to that pre Big Bang singular point.

If the latter should happen, there could be another Big Bang, and a new universe could come into existence. This process could have happened an infinite number of times already.

There could be other dimensions to reality so that all possible outcomes are given their due course. And black holes might instantly take us to the other side of the galaxy or even the universe, or they might lead to other universes. Our entire universe might work as a single atom in another universe.

It’s amazing and more than a little scary. We’re so small, so vulnerable, and we blink in and out so quickly. Life is a mystery.

I am thankful for peanut butter and the genius who first combined peanut butter and chocolate. I am thankful for tall pretty boys with long legs. And when they wear boots and short shorts….I am especially grateful for that.

A few thoughts on the history of our species.

A number of years ago, I heard an anthropologist claim that people in primary cultures or hunter/gatherer societies probably worked only about twenty hours a week. Then the other night I watched an episode of the History Channel’s Mankind: The Story Of All Of Us and the claim was made that the transition to an agrarian way of life had a negative impact on our general health and standard of living. A less varied diet made us shorter, and living so close to domestic livestock exposed us to disease, and since we adopted permanent homes that needed to be defended, we became more prone to war and violence.

All of this made me wonder if civilization is actually a good thing. Maybe we took a wrong turn. It also made me think that perhaps the Garden of Eden myth comes from our collective memory of our hunter/gatherer past. Maybe we instinctively desire to live closer to nature as we once did for thousands of years.

I’ve read that primary cultures tend to emphasize the feminine. Rather than male angry, violent sky gods, they worship nurturing earth goddesses. Imagine the dramatic difference in mentality. Rather than existing in a world where you have to fight to survive, you live in a world of abundance, a world that embraces you and provides for you, and all you have to do is roll yourself out of bed in the morning and go find something to eat.

I suspect that Christianity was an attempt to reclaim some of that feminine energy. Jesus was a pacifist, not a warrior, and he urged his followers to stop worrying about their possessions and about survival and simply live.

In any event, I don’t think the message really sank in with most Christians. Most of Christian history is full of war, violence and lust for political power and material possessions. And the whole ugly mess has been hidden behind the facade of neighborly love.

Maternal Love

The love was sweet, soothing, quiet
And I always knew it was there
It was there under the strange cackles
The popping of her gum
The popping of her rocking chair

The maniacal popping
Obsessive, excessive, insane
The chatter, the crazy, crazy chatter
Even more incessant
But at the core was a quiet and gentle love

It wore you down, that popping and chatter
There was no end to it
There was always more and more and more
No matter how many times you begged for mercy
Still there was always that quiet and gentle love, too

When the popping and chatter exploded into drama
When the monotony of unfathomable absurdities parted
When the fear frothed into threats of violence
And her voice trembled with hatred for her “enemies”
I knew the core was still there, somewhere

She shattered like glass every day
She chattered and popped and laughed
Ah, those crazy, mean laughs, derisive and cruel
But then in a quiet moment she would settle
She would relax and smile, warmly and show that which was not broken.

A work in progress.

I’m in the process of outlining a novel I want to write next year set in a house like this, except I imagine the old place as more dilapidated. It’s about two boys in their last year in high school. They fall in love, and this house which belongs to the mother of one of the boys--she travels a lot, so they usually have the place to themselves--becomes their sanctuary. It takes place in mid 1980s West Virginia, and since the world around them won’t allow them to be open about their feelings for one another, they create their own world. They have their own prom on the porch. They are still together, and they have since inherited the house and turned it into a B&B. I first wanted to write this story back when I was in high school, but I just couldn’t make a go of it back then, and that’s because I didn’t have a boyfriend, didn’t know any gay couples, didn’t see any gay couples on TV. I couldn’t imagine the details or figure out how my characters would maintain a relationship in such a hostile environment. So I think it’s time for me to write that story. And even though things have changed, I don’t think there’s nearly enough simple, romantic boy meets boy stories out there, especially ones with a happily ever after ending.

 

Photographer and subjects unknown.

 

Huygens and His 17th Century Space Aliens

Christiaan Huygens 1629-1695 was a Dutch astronomer who made great strides in understanding the rings of Saturn.  His father Constantijn Huygens was a patron and friend of artists, poets, writers, philosophers and scientists.  And Holland at the time was a liberal center for the arts and scholarly pursuits.  It was in this nurturing environment that Huygens imagined life was possible on other planets in our solar system, and he imagined that it was possible that planets orbited far away stars.  He wrote and published a book about his speculations in the 1690s shortly before his death.  He did so without fear of persecution.  That’s astonishing when you consider women were being hanged as witches here in this country at about the same time Huygens’ book was published and that Galileo was found guilty of heresy for claiming the Sun was at the center of the universe when Huygens was a child.

Homophobic Expectations Influence Perception

When Percival Lowell (1855-1916) read that there appeared to be something like canals on the surface of Mars, he decided to investigate for himself. He spent a significant amount of his life looking at Mars through telescopes in the early morning hours and drawing maps of what he saw. Lowell was convinced he had observed evidence that there was once intelligent life on Mars. Lowell was sure the canals had been built by Martians. Lowell turned out to be wrong, and his beliefs serve to illustrate how our expectations can influence our perceptions. We often see what we expect and want to see.

Lowell was a visionary, someone who was following his dreams, and although his conclusions were often off base, his determination and enthusiasm is inspirational. However, our all too human tendency to see things as we expect and want them has a darker side. Bigotry is born of this trick of the mind.

I once had an argument with a homophobe who was convinced that all gay men behave like the participants of San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair, and he was sure that this proved our nature was savage. I informed him that he was mistaken and that his assumption indicated that he was biased, but he demanded that I prove him wrong. I stopped communicating with him at that point. It was obvious his mind was made up, and he was not interested in me as a person. To him, I was other, some strange creature that was to be feared and hated.

I don’t think that gay men would be any less human or any less deserving of respect even if all of us did behave like the participants of the Folsom Street Fair. But since I know myself, and since I’ve come to know a number of other gay men, I’m aware that we are not all alike. Some gay men, given the chance, would fully participate in the high jinks of the Folsom Street Fair or some similar event someplace else. Some may do so because they enjoy it and feel no need to restrain themselves. Others might do it as a kind of rebellion against sexual repression and shaming. Some gay men might go to an event like that and observe. Some might get some level of satisfaction out of looking at images and reading of detailed accounts of what goes on there. Some gay men may never think of going there but don’t think any less of those who do, and then there are some gay men who condemn such open displays of sexuality to one degree or another.

In regards to the Folsom Street Fair, our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors run the gamut…just like straight people. But try telling that to someone who wants to view us in a certain light. To them, we are not fellow human beings or individuals. We have been assigned to play a certain role in their imagination, and they’re not about to let us mess up their weird, highly sexed, grand inner pageant. They project onto us their own insatiable lust, and we become outward reflections of the sex monsters that they dare not admit live inside their own psyches, and that’s that. When we discover someone is like that, we may as well growl at them and have a good laugh at their foolishness.

The blue late afternoon light of December.

I now live in Merced, CA, and Merced really doesn’t do winter. It’s a little chilly here in December, January and February, and we get a little rain, but that’s it. This is in start contrast to what winters were like in West Virginia, which is where I lived most of my life. There are certain things about winter that I don’t miss at all--those long stretches of frigid temperatures in January and February, snow that doesn’t met for days and turns icy and crunchy, ice covered sidewalks and roads, that blinding morning and early afternoon light that fails to provide any warmth. It was sometimes hard to keep yourself warm in winter, and getting out of the house was sometimes dangerous. But there are some things I miss…like breathing in the crisp, clean air, letting it fill my lungs. That was invigorating. Watching the fog come out of my mouth was fun. Falling snow is beautiful. And the world covered in fresh snow is beautiful. And that blue late afternoon light in December… I miss that.

Photographer and subject unknown.


Jared Loughner and Mental Illness

Jared Loughner, the gunman who shot Rep. Gabby Giffords and killed six others, received seven life sentences today. I’m glad that Loughner will never have the chance to shoot anyone else, but in my opinion, demonizing Loughner--who is clearly mentally ill and who, by all accounts, was in the midst of a psychotic episode when he went on his killing spree--will not help.

Most who know me well are aware that my mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Thankfully, she never got hold of a gun and blew anyone away while she was psychotic, but if she had done something like that, it would NOT have been because she was evil or because she was a bad person. She was severely mentally ill, and there were periods in her life when she was unable to grasp what was going on in the real world around her. Most of the time, this meant she was more of a risk to herself than anyone else. We had to watch her like a parent would watch a toddler. It was exhausting, and frustrating, and you can bet I did my share of bitching at her for doing stupid and possibly dangerous things. But ultimately the bitching was completely and totally pointless, and that’s because she wasn’t trying my patience for the fun of it. She was mentally ill, and blaming someone for being mentally ill is as irrational as blaming someone for having a nightmare.

Some people have diseases that attack their lungs. Some have diseases that attack their kidneys. Some have heart disease. AND SOME HAVE BRAIN DISEASE. You can shake your moralizing finger all you want to, preach until the cows come home, pontificate until you’re blue in the face, throw every person like Jared Loughner under the prison, and it will not prevent one single person on this planet from experiencing a psychotic episode.

The human brain is a very fragile thing, and certain people are vulnerable. We need to figure out how to get these people the help they need BEFORE they do something awful, and we need to do that while also respecting and protecting civil liberties. We know that governments can and will use its power to commit citizens for political purposes. It’s happened before. Individuals have been known to “put away” family members for nefarious reasons. We have to guard against these things, but we also need to face the fact that a certain number of people among us are so mentally ill they are a threat to themselves and others. These people need our help, not our scorn and condemnation.

Cosmos

A few days ago I started watching Cosmos on Netfix. I had forgotten just how wonderful the series is. Carl Sagan had a special way of condensing and explaining scientific discoveries about the universe. He was a gifted storyteller as well as a brilliant scientist. His prose style may have been a bit over the top. I remember that it became fairly common back in the ’80s to make fun of his phraseology and his nerdy enthusiasm for astronomy. All you had to say was “billions and billions” and most knew immediately that you were referring to Carl Sagan. I have to admit that I sometimes wish he had used a little less syrup.

But then again, who am I to criticize. He got his point across very effectively. He made you contemplate certain things in a way that helped you get past the abstract. When he got into his pretend spaceship and talked about the vastness of space as he showed you the most exquisite images of far away galaxies, you got a sense of just how huge the universe really is. We know that it’s huge, but I don’t think most of us really think about it much. Our whole galaxy is really just a little hole in the wall, but most of the time we seem to think we’re the main attraction.

He helped us contemplate the vastness of time by compressing everything from the Big Bang to the present into a single cosmic year. The Big Bang occurred on January 1. The planet Earth appeared four billion years ago sometime in September. And human beings have been around for the last few seconds of December 31.

When you lay it all out there, let it all sink in, it’s hard for me to imagine that our opinions and beliefs matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. And the idea that this giant show was staged just for our benefit… It seems absurd to me.

Recently I discovered that a friend of mine died. I had known this person for several years. It was the film Brokeback Mountain that brought us together. When I showed up at the discussion board at IMDb in the fall of 2006, Shasta was already there. I never met her in person, but we were in regular contact for a very long time. We exchanged messages online, sometimes long, personal messages. We sent cards to each other, exchanged Christmas gifts. And I’m not the only fan of Brokeback Mountain that she befriended. She reached out to dozens of us. So after the shock of discovering she was gone, another shock hit me. None of her Brokeback Mountain friends knew she had died until I thought to look for her obituary online. By the time I found the obit, Shasta had been gone for more than a month.

Shasta started complaining of serious pain in the summer of 2011. She said she had started putting her “affairs in order” then. She made a list of things she wanted to her cousin to know if something happened to her. So why didn’t the cousin or someone know that her Brokeback mountain friends would like to have been informed when she was put into hospice care in early September and when she died later that month?

Shasta knew I had become very active on Facebook. I often invited her to become a Facebook friend, but she seemed to show little interest Facebook. So we continued to communicate through a small message board. And then after I found the obituary, I discovered that she did in deed have a Facebook account. She was on Facebook before me.

Shasta was from Arkansas, and she was very active in her church, and she taught English at a private Christian school. And it dawned on me that like so many LGBT people, especially from rural, conservative areas, Shasta, a straight ally, was, in a sense, in the closet. She spent hours online, almost every day for more than five years, communicating with her Brokeback Mountain friends, but apparently she couldn’t tell anyone who knew her in person that we existed or that we were important to her. Maybe she was afraid she would be shunned. She may have even been afraid she would be fired. I just don’t know.

It’s ironic because the story Brokeback Mountain was about the tragedy of leading an inauthentic life. Maybe that’s one of the reasons she related to the film. Maybe she didn’t feel like she could be completely herself with her loved ones. Maybe life in the small Arkansas town where she lived was too confining to her. Maybe her Brokeback Mountain friends were her fishing buddies.

I grew up in southern West Virginia, so I’m familiar with the kind of environment that Shasta lived in. I know that you can only stray so far before your thought of as an outcast, especially if you make church people your closest friends. I spent half of my life terrified that someone would discover who I really am, and it seems I’m destined to spend the rest of my life recovering from the shellshock.

I’m so tired of trying to manage personal information, of trying to decide who should know what and how much. In the larger scheme of thing, does it really matter what anyone thinks of me? As fat as I am, I’m just a fly speck. And I’m going to be dead soon. Even if I live to be a hundred, I will have been alive for less than a second of the last day of the cosmic year.

So if you really can’t stand that I’m a short, overweight, out of shape, middle aged gay man from a hick state who wouldn’t feel all that comfortable in a restaurant much more fancy than Applebee’s, then just let me go. If you think there’s something wrong with me because I prefer wispy, thin “twinks” to beefy, hairy mature men, then just let me go. If you just can’t stomach the fact that I think Jesus stories are, more or less, mythology and not literally true, then just let me go. If you can’t tolerate my fashion sense, or lack there of, then just let me go. If you just hate the fact that I don’t have a job and that I’m on disability social security, then just let me go. If you think it’s weird that I don’t drive, don’t have a boyfriend, never had a boyfriend, haven’t had sex since the ‘90s and that I’m painfully shy, then just let me go. If all of my typos and grammar mistakes drive you up the wall, just let me go. Rather than trying to shame me and try to force me to hide certain facts about who I am, let me be. I’ve only got a short while to be here, and then I’ll be gone.

P.S. If there is some kind of heaven like afterlife, I hope Shasta will be reunited with her dogs there, just as she wanted.      



　

　

　

　

A few thoughts on sex...for what they're worth...which probably ain't much. LOL

For many, monogamy is a goal. They hope to find the right person some day. For others it is a fulfilling way of life. But monogamy isn’t for everybody. And that’s true of LGBT people and straight people.

So long as you’re not out there seducing guys in order to get into their pants and then dumping them and breaking their hearts when you’re finished with them, and so long as you’re not lying to your significant other about what you’re doing, I can’t see how it’s anybody’s business.

I think the goal should be finding your path, your way. Live in the way that works best for you and don’t worry so much about living up to some imagined propriety.

People are different. I’ve known all kinds of gay men. Some were hardly interested in sex at all. Some liked to play around a little while they were looking for the right guy. Some had a lot of partners. Some went through stages…they’d have lots of partners for a while, then hardly any, then back to having lots of partners. Some were monogamous. Some were in open relationships.

Their happiness and self-fulfillment seemed to depend more on being honest and treating themselves and others with respect than leading a particular kind of life.