My Teenage Dream of a Gay Apartment House in LA

When I was about 15, a neighbor went to Los Angeles on vacation, and she brought us back a copy of the LA Times as a souvenir. I thought that was a pretty cool gift since I had never been to a large city.

This was in the early ’80s. LGBTs were still deep in the closet. I had known I was gay for several years by this point, but I had never told anyone, and I had never met an out gay person. However, I was aware of gay ghettos in large metro areas like LA. I had recently seen American Gigolo, which had given me my first glimpse into a gay bar. I knew the film was set in and around Los Angeles, so I scoured that paper looking for any telltale signs of gay life in the city.

I found what I was looking for in the classifieds. It was an ad for an apartment. The special thing about this apartment was that it was for a gay man or a gay couple. All the apartments in the building were for gay guys. Wow!

This set my imagination on fire, and I could feel the hope swelling inside me. Imagine an entire apartment building filled with gay men! I was sure they’d all look like Richard Gere or the cute blond boy. (If you remember the film, you know who I’m talking about.) I immediately started dreaming of moving to LA and living in such an apartment building. I was sure we’d all be the best of buddies and hot, friendly sex would always be available. It would be like heaven.

Sincerely Bigoted

I grew up among Christian fundamentalists, and they seemed to think all kinds of things were sinful—gambling, drinking, extra and premarital sex, short skirts, tight pants, cussing… But they weren’t really sticklers about much of it. They thought working on a Sunday was sinful, but they didn’t refrain from buying stuff on Sundays, and if you had a job that required you to work on Sunday, they’d say that God will understand. They didn’t try to force stores to stop selling beer. They didn’t shun family and friends who drank. They thought smoking was sinful. My parents thought smoking was sinful, and yet they both smoked. My parents and my aunt and uncle smoked right in front of my grandmother who was the most pious member of the family. They even smoked in her house.

Harsh condemnation was usually reserved for people they didn’t like—uppity blacks, trashy whites, slutty women, rebellious teenagers and queers. Nearly everyone else was given some slack. The fundamentalists of southern West Virginia regularly used their religion to justify their prejudices.

That’s why I have little patience with the idea that those who judge and want the legal right to discriminate against LGBTs today are just doing what they think is right. I’ve seen this kind of thing before many times, and in my opinion, it has little to do with “sincerely held religious beliefs.”

Republican Jesus: A New Religion?

I’ve been reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. It’s a fascinating book. I love it. Harari argues that the thing that gave sapiens an advantage over other animals and other human species was something he calls a “cognitive revolution.” (Not to be confused with a development in the study of psychology.)

According to Harari, sapiens are able to organize themselves in huge groups consisting of thousands and even millions of individuals because of their ability to accept mutually agreed upon constructs, or fictions as he calls them, that are not part of the physical world. Constructs such as nations, borders and money.

The interesting thing about these constructs is that they can vary from group to group, and humans are capable of adapting to rapid changes in these group constructs. Thus indicating the ability to understand and accept these constructs might be in our nature, but the individual constructs are contrived by individual groups. (There goes the concept of natural law.) That’s why the French could go from believing in the divine right of kings to the idea that sovereignty rests in the people almost overnight. Religion has played a significant role in helping form cultures and group identity and shared beliefs, and Harari claims that the belief in capitalism and corporations works in much the same way.
 
That made me think of the Republican Jesus. What if Republican Jesus is actually a completely new religion with the façade of classic Christianity but with capitalism at its core? Something like that has happened before with the Santeria religion, the Caribbean religion that is outwardly Catholic with a West African mythology.