Death is a party, life is a bitch

I've always had a thing for Anthony Perkins, and I come back around to it every few years. This is the song I usually come back to. There was something curiously affecting about his voice. He wasn't a natural singer and did not have a big or resonant set of pipes. But he had something else. Along with his innate musicality, he had sincerity. His singing was like speaking in some ways - not speak-singing like those actors who can't sing, but communicating so much intensity with the song that it is like a conversation. 

Yes, he got typecast as Norman Bates, and the only sad thing about that was the dreadful set of sequels. Other than that, he got along well and performed, sometimes brilliantly, in just about every acting genre. People noticed he looked rather strange in the latter part of his life, that his face was somehow less mobile on one side. What people didn't know was that he had Bell's palsy, and in getting treatment for it he found out he had AIDS.

People don't die from AIDS any more, so we've lost touch with the horror of it. They can live a long time, though the disease must be a constant presence on some level. It does not "go away". Being bipolar does not "go away" either, it is a constant presence, and it is not pleasant to have to take six drugs to control it. Just thought I'd throw that in.

I've read a couple of Perkins bios. One was kind of raggy, sensational, as if that was the only part of his life that mattered. It recounted every escapade and foible, but second-hand, through the accounts of people who had known him. The other one was a little too reserved, respectful, but devoid of detail. I think he was both of those people, and neither - an enigma. When he died, closely attended by his wife Berry and their two sons, his friends decided to have a be-in in the sickroom, bringing sleeping bags and food and singing to him while he passed in and out of consciousness. At one point he sat up suddenly and said, "What is this, a death watch?" - provoking much hilarity.

To die like that - I've only ever heard of one other person who died like that, with a party going on around him. Alan Ginsberg. It says something about a person, if people show up for your death, sit at your bedside, listen to stories they've heard a dozen times, hug the wife and take the kids out for hamburgers so she can have a break. 

People constantly talk about giving, but it's also blessed to receive, to stop fighting the gift. I know something about this, and I am going to know a lot more about it. If people can't "take" (and they often won't or can't, thinking it's somehow selfish or "bad"), they block the goodwill. It can no longer flow. They keep their loved ones from helping them, refuse them. In essence, they hang up the phone on love.

I don't know what got me started on all this. "Summertime Love". The title makes you think of Beach Blanket Bingo or something like that. But it's not like that at all. The song is from a strange, mystical stage musical called Greenwillow. It only ran for a couple of months.

"That actor who turned out to be gay". I don't much care about that any more, and he doesn't, where he is now. Such things really don't matter. The LGBTQ movement exists to prove it doesn't matter - doesn't nail you to a cross or suck the joy out of your life, because it can't.

How you die reflects how you have lived. Absolutely. I pray someone will be there, I do. Just one will be OK with me.

(A postscript. This needs to be said because it is part of the story. Less than ten years after AIDS claimed Tony, Berry Berenson was killed. She was on one of those planes that hit the World Trade Centre. I don't want to think about what those final minutes were like. But she, too, was not alone. I hope there was some shred of comfort in that.)

Stay gay!

Man imprisoned for being gay to get posthumous pardon from Trudeau

'It’s great that the young Trudeau is finishing the work that his father started,' lawyer says.

CBC News Posted: Feb 28, 2016 4:06 PM ET Last Updated: Feb 28, 2016 8:25 PM ET


The Klippert case stoked considerable media and political interest in Canada and prompted the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau to introduce a bill in 1967 that, among other things, called for the decriminalization of private, consensual homosexual acts between people over the age of 21.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau intends to posthumously pardon Everett George Klippert who, because he admitted to police in the 1960s that he was gay, was deemed a dangerous sexual offender and sent to prison.

"The prime minister intends to recommend that a pardon under the authority of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy be granted posthumously to Mr. Klippert," Trudeau's office said in a media release.

The move was cheered Sunday by gay-rights advocates.

"It's fantastic that he'll get a posthumous pardon," lawyer Doug Elliott told CBC News.

As well, the statement said the Liberal government will also look to see whether pardons are "warranted" after reviewing the cases of other individuals who in the past were convicted on charges such as gross indecency and buggery.

"As Canadians, we know that protecting and promoting fundamental human rights must be an imperative for governments and individuals alike, and this includes gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation," the weekend statement said.

Trudeau's office credited Klippert's case for being "instrumental" in Canada's decision to decriminalize homosexual acts between consenting adults.

Indefinite prison sentence

Klippert was questioned by the RCMP in 1965 during an arson investigation in Pine Point, N.W.T. He wasn't involved in the fire, but voluntarily said he'd had sexual relations with four men. He was charged with four counts of gross indecency, all for consensual, private, non-violent acts.

In 1966, Klippert was visited in prison by a Crown-appointed psychiatrist who concluded that Klippert's homosexuality was "incurable," and that he therefore met the criteria regarding dangerous sexual offenders.

A judge agreed and sentenced Klippert to preventive detention, meaning an indefinite term in prison.

The sentence was backed up by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1967, although Chief Justice John Cartwright suggested the laws regarding homosexuality be clarified, and that incarceration of harmless homosexuals was not their intention.

The Klippert case stoked considerable media and political interest. Just six weeks later, Pierre Trudeau, the Liberal government's justice minister (who would later become prime minister) introduced a bill that, among other things, called for the decriminalization of private, consensual homosexual acts between people over the age of 21.

"It's great that the young Trudeau is finishing the work that his father started," Elliott said.

Before homosexuality was decriminalized in 1969, people were routinely charged with gross indecency — a charge almost always applied to homosexuals — but rarely for private, consensual acts.

Klippert was released from prison on July 21, 1971. He was 69 when he died in in 1996.

"I never understood: Why didn't Pierre Trudeau let him out in 1969 when they decriminalized gay sex?" Elliott said. "They kept the poor guy who was responsible for shining a light on this issue in jail for another couple of years."

Last week, the prime minister confirmed he will march in Toronto's Pride parade on July 3, a move that would make history with Trudeau being the first sitting PM in Canada to take part in the event.

BLOGGER'S COMMENTS. So why this? Why now? When I saw this article, I groaned - groaned that anyone was ever imprisoned for consensual sex of any kind. Consenting adults in private - isn't that the deal? Shouldn't that have been the deal even then? I guess not.

I also groaned at the word "pardon". It means "forgiveness of wrongdoing", which isn't exactly what we're after here, is it? It's like saying "I forgive you" to someone who hasn't done anything. It doesn't go down too well with me. I've been "forgiven" for shit THEY did to ME.

But the worst were the comments: 84 of them, and nearly all of them extremely negative, vilifying Justin Trudeau for wasting taxpayers'dollars/our precious time. Of those who commented, practically no one showed any sensitivity at all for the plight of this man and the countless others who did serious time because of their sexual orientation. The vast majority believed it was an irrelevant issue that belonged in the musty vaults of the past.

I think it's time i stopped reading , watching and listening to the news . the lunacy of our current and recent governments is just getting too much for me .

This Guy wont stop anywhere to scrape out an extra vote. .What has happened happened you cant turn back time but the Liberals think all you have to do is throw taxpayer money at any situation..

Nothing more important to d than pardoning dead people? This is like the ministry of truth in 1984 rewriting history.

Oh for God's sake please don't ! . Do we not have enough problems here in Canada to deal with now as it is ?? with out having to go digging up old dead skeletons ?? next thing you'll hear is how some folks are going to be demanding "compensation" for being wrongly convicted decades ago. This will only lead to further strain on our already collapsing economy .

This is what our Prime Minister is focusing on?

The insanity continues... How about dealing with what is happening in Canada now?

I cannot believe he has to delve into the past when seniors are close to eating dog food and they are throwing $1700 a month to each member of a Syrian family stuffed into a hotel room in Toronto. JT please .....

Why do the important business of the nation when you can do stuff like this.

That figures. No surprises there.

My dismay at this story just grows: as was usually done back then, this guy was "examined" and deemed "incurable" by a psychiatrist. So what is that supposed to mean? It shook loose some pretty disturbing memories: all sorts of shit came pouring back into my mind. I used to read a great deal of crap - now I have no idea why, though most of it fell under the guise of "self-help". I guess I thought these "experts" knew better than I did about how to live my life.

One of my favorite psycho-babblers was one Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin, one of those New York psychoanalytic types who got into writing simplistic bestsellers like The Angry Book and The Thin Book by a Formerly Fat Psychiatrist. Everything was pathologized in his books, including anything sexual that didn't fit within the bounds of holy matrimony, in the missionary position, not more than once or twice a month.

Here is one of his pronouncements on homosexuality:

“Homosexuality is a symptom of emotional disturbance. Emotional disturbance can be remedied and the homosexual can become heterosexual, but the psychotherapeutic process is long and quite often painful… This means in effect, changing the relating habits of a lifetime—no easy matter. Few homosexual people have the extraordinary motivation required to take on this great effort—but some do and are successful.” (Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin, The Winner’s Notebook, New York: Pocket Books, 1969, p. 53)

Just the fact that this is in a book called The Winner's Notebook (and I - gasp, gulp - remember reading it and in fact might still have a copy floating around) takes a distancing, poking-with-a-sharp-stick approach to "homosexuality", as if to say, "We know none of this applies to us, because we're Winners. But not everyone is in that category. Some of these people are so emotionally fucked-up that they can't even make themselves straight, the way they could and would if they were motivated and really tried."

This book came out in that pivotal year, 1969, when Pierre Trudeau, father of our current Prime Minister, decriminalized gay sex with the famous statement, "The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation." But it took another two years for Everett Klippert to be set free, and no doubt he carried a criminal record, not to mention deep emotional scars, for the rest of his life.

Anthony Perkins, best-known for the Hitchcock thriller Psycho, was a fine and sensitive actor/human being who was forever questing for truth. He also strove personfully to give up his own natural orientation in order to get married and have kids: in other words, to make himself straight. But in this impossible goal he was influenced hugely by his analyst, Mildred Newman, the author of the famous/ infamous 1970s bestseller, How to Be Your Own Best Friend.

“Analysts once thought that they had little chance of changing homosexuals’ preferences and had little success in that direction. But some refused to accept that and kept working with them, and we’ve found that a homosexual who really wants to change has a very good chance of doing so. Now we’re hearing all kinds of success stories. The nature of homosexuality hasn’t changed, but the way of looking at it has.”

Though Tony was widely viewed as one of Newman's "success stories", mainly because he had a long-suffering wife and managed to stay married, he died of AIDS in 1992, weighed down with guilt and shame that he had not been able to live up to the pressure to "go straight".

If a man had consensual sex with a man (for women didn't seem to be included in the equation), it was a criminal act, and it stayed that way for a very long time. People went to jail for it the same way they would for child sexual abuse. But thanks to "experts" like Rubin and Newman, homosexuality was converted from a crime into a serious mental illness, a pathology. For this, these therapists were viewed as compassionate humanitarians deserving of praise, if not awards. The underlying agenda was that you had to act straight, no matter how you really felt. Stay married. Keep it hidden. This is where the expression "in the closet" originated.

There might have been a time in my life that I didn't "get" all this. And I will never get it the way someone who has lived through it would. But things are different, there has been a shift. I had very mixed feelings about this pardon, because as far as I am concerned the man did nothing wrong. How do you pardon something that isn't a crime? The reasoning is, it was a crime THEN and so it needs to be pardoned retroactively. This is sad, but not as sad as all those ranty ugly comments, the dozens and scores and even hundreds of them, from people who seemed to feel we were wasting our time on all this stuff and should just forget about it. Because the guy is dead, or because it's a "gay issue", it isn't worth the public's concern.

It's the same attitude that says, those aboriginal people should just get on with it! This is 2016, they can't have a pow-wow and try to get all that land back, because it belongs to US now. It's just a waste of taxpayers' dollars. As a relative of mine likes to say, "Awww, why not just shoot 'em."

Our culture does not understand reparation. It doesn't. It barely understands any sort of attitudinal shift and why it needs to happen. There are a great many people keeping their mouths shut because they don't have the courage to come out with what they really believe. Instead, they slap ugliness all over the newspaper comments section UNDER ALIASES, saving themselves any sort of repercussion. It's the most cowardly act I can think of for a writer not to sign a piece of their work.

Back in the Stone Age when I wrote for newspapers (and I spent 25 or 30 years doing so and wrote literally thousands of columns and reviews), the paper phoned me if I wrote a letter to the editor to verify my identity. I had to provide my phone number and full address if my letter was even to be considered for publication. Now the most toxic spews appear under full protection of anonymity, so that people can savage the article, the editor, the paper itself, and all the other people submitting comments, not to mention all those politically-correct types who keep wasting our time and money. So long as the comment isn't "defamatory" (and by whose standards, I do not know), it gets posted. This is considered a "valuable public forum" and a place for people to air their grievances and express their disagreements. That's the worst pile of shit I have heard of in my life.

So hatred has a new place to hide. This crap never gets solved or healed, never goes away - just goes underground. This makes reading/watching the news so depressing that I am increasingly avoiding it. It's grim, oppressive and does not do anyone any good, and it does not improve my increasingly low opinion of the human race.

I like to think that being happy is an act of resistance - one I must work on daily to avoid a tidal wave of soul-destroying depression. And I don't always make it. But I will be damned if I will let these bastards take from me the things and the people I hold most dear. I won't let them have my compassion, or my intelligence, or my joy. But my God, I wish sometimes that it wasn't such an interminable and exhausting battle.

http://www.homosexuals-anonymous.com/

The Ballad of Reading Gaol (Excerpt)

By OSCAR WILDE

He did not wear his scarlet coat,

For blood and wine are red,

And blood and wine were on his hands

When they found him with the dead,

The poor dead woman whom he loved,

And murdered in her bed.

He walked amongst the Trial Men

In a suit of shabby gray;

A cricket cap was on his head,

And his step seemed light and gay;

But I never saw a man who looked

So wistfully at the day.

I never saw a man who looked

With such a wistful eye

Upon that little tent of blue

Which prisoners call the sky,

And at every drifting cloud that went

With sails of silver by.

I walked, with other souls in pain,

Within another ring,

And was wondering if the man had done

A great or little thing,

When a voice behind me whispered low,

"That fellow's got to swing."

Dear Christ! the very prison walls

Suddenly seemed to reel,

And the sky above my head became

Like a casque of scorching steel;

And, though I was a soul in pain,

My pain I could not feel.

I only knew what hunted thought

Quickened his step, and why

He looked upon the garish day

With such a wistful eye;

The man had killed the thing he loved,

And so he had to die.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

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"Why I dare not come out of the closet"

I found myself looking up this entry in the original Morningside Papers anthology today, for no reason I can ascertain except that I remembered it. I remembered a story of a gay man, married, so closeted he can barely breathe, and convinced that the closet will be his fate, if not his doom, for the rest of his life.

But what startles me about this piece is the language. He reveals his orientation with  horror and revulsion, like someone who goes around murdering little children. After laying out the facts of his stable, wonderful, conservative life, he then rips open the cover to reveal a festering secret, a secret that seems to come right out of one of those 1940s "warning" films:

He likes men.

I like men. Almost all my close friends have been men, all my life. I've always felt a certain kinship with gay men because of that fact. I'm monogamous, meaning I haven't had the opportunity to spread myself out too much, but I like to look. I'm 61, and I like to look and dream and have some pretty hot fantasies. I like the smell of a man, the firmness of body, the hair, the voice, the hands.

I guess if I was a man, I'd be gay. Would all this be horrible?

If I was free to do so, would it be horrible for me to want to claim all this bounty sexually?

Obviously, I don't get it. I never have. But what I HAVE had are a few "confessions" over the years, mostly by older men, about their one sexual encounter with a man, sometimes coerced, sometimes not, and how they agonized about it, all the while living a hetero life. One man was sixteen when he lied his way into the army during World War II, and was blackmailed into sex with an older man with fear of disclosure that he was underage. When he told me this as an old man, barely able to look me in the eye, I didn't know what to say to him except, "I am honoured that you told me this. Thank you." And I meant it: I was, literally, the only person he ever told.

So the skinny five per cent this guy mentions seems puzzlingly small. Sexuality spreads out a lot more than that, waxes and wanes. We're not puzzle pieces. We flow. Our desires flow, but sometimes they flow strongly in one direction. This poor guy is so rigid that he believes he'll be executed if he's ever "found out". He skulks around in back alleys on business trips. He has a "Jekyll and Hyde" personality. Whoo boy.

Was this sad, sad piece written in the '40s, the '50s perhaps? No, it was written and published in 1984. Mind, that was 31 years ago (? How can it be true?), and so much has happened since then that this piece seems archaic, even a little bit insulting.

It's insulting to gay men who are proud of who they are. Yes, they existed in 1984 because I knew a few of them. It's insulting in the horror-movie language it uses, the description of gayness as plague and blight. The utter unbending certainty of "ruin" if this ever "got out" is, come to think of it, a little nasty, because it supposes a culture utterly devoid of flexibility or understanding.

This guy thinks he HAS to live a lie, and that he must be the Christlike sacrifice to keep the whole ruse going. But he isn't the sacrifice. His wife is: she doesn't even know who she is married to. His kids are: every day their father sits at the breakfast table across from them with a big sign on his forehead that says, "I am not who you think I am." Chronic deception causes tension in a household, often on a subconscious level that gnaws away and erodes emotional health. Nothing is as it seems, because it cannot be, "must not" be what it is. The truth is just too horrific.  This is a guaranteed method of throwing your family permanently off-balance. It's like living with Don Draper, for God's sake, with his false identity and ruthless sexual conquests, some of them acted out with his neighbor across the hall.

I wonder whatever happened to this guy. He seemed at the breaking point. I wonder if he continued to feel, as he seemed to feel then, that keeping up the ruse of "normalcy" at work and church and home was the only right thing to do. It's twisted, and it's an example of why things had to change, and why they need to keep changing.

In spite of what media blast at us every day, not everyone is "cool" with being gay. If you are from a fundamentalist background of any stripe, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, it is not cool. It is Sin. Sin is something you're supposed to atone for. Then, "go and sin no more". Bible camps seek to straighten people out with the hammer of guilt, even though the founder of one of the largest of these groups went on record to say that the whole thing had been a tragic mistake (before moving in with his male lover).

On the surface of things, this piece, very much of its time, shows us how far we have come. But it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Under the horror-movie language is a strange kind of boasting, very much in the Don Draper mode: look what I am getting away with. And fuck you, you conventional people, because I have my own little private world here and I'm going to make sure my wife and kids and colleagues never find out. I have known men who have made the decision to be married to women, and gay "on the side", so to speak. In some cases, their wives even know. Perhaps they've resolved the tension, or think of themselves as bisexual (and hey, whatever happened to bisexual? Nobody's bisexual any more. It has become extremely unpopular for some reason). It is society that creates most of the problems here, refusing human beings the fluidity and even androgyny that is deep in their nature.

Keep sloggin' forward, folks. Keep that banner hoisted high. Think of Dublin! And think of this poor sod, who is perhaps not even alive any more, the homosexual who dares not come out of the closet.

"You had me at hello"

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The "stretchy-seat" paradox

There's this weird, oh, I don't know, thing. This paradox. We generally assume, most of us, that being gay in the 1950s was horribly stigmatized, even persecuted, something you had to scrupulously hide in case you were "found out".

You had to be "manly", meaning devoid of any sort of attraction to your own sex. The pressure was enormous. You had to line yourself up with movie stars like Rock Hudson (oops) and Raymond Burr (double-oops), who were then believed to be rampantly heterosexual.

SO WHAT'S THIS SHIT ALL ABOUT?

These are men's underwear ads, presumably from the 1950s, in which men are in such blatantly homoerotic positions that it just makes you wonder. Is this just  "oh, surely not", or a "hey, they're just joshing around" kind of thing?

But think about it. Back then we had male comedy teams like Martin and Lewis, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. (Crosby and Danny Kaye, later "outed" as gay, even appeared in drag in White Christmas.) We had singing duos who came on Ed Sullivan - what the hell was the name of that duo? I'll have to look it up AGAIN, even though I've looked it up 27 times before. (Sandler and Young.)

But none of them appeared in these kinds of poses, like the one below, with the guy on the left just waiting to be serviced by the other guy, who seems to be getting down on his knees. This ad must have been designed by somebody like Sal Romano from Mad Men, who had to sublimate his illicit passions into his artwork.

Maybe people were gay-blind then. Or they are now, when looking back. Surely it meant something else to bandy about terms like "stretchy-seat"? We just assume everybody was clean-cut and devoid of any non-Doris-Day-humping impulses back then. In fact, if these ads are any indication, it looks like there was lots of very public boy-on-boy action going on, and it was considered completely OK. Stuff that today would make people squirm.

Like this.

These are ads for a sort of one-piece spandex jumpsuit/panty-girdle for men, with legs in it. Presumably there was a fly in them somewhere (there's some mention of a horizontal fly, a bizarre concept if ever there was one, reminding me for some reason of a sideways vagina), or maybe you just wriggled them down like women did. They had a patented "stretchy-seat" in them (no kidding!) that presumably gave a little testicular support during spontaneous wrestling matches on the living room floor. This was strong enough to contain the most explosive fart, and could not (presumably) be penetrated from the outside. I don't know if the one-piece "union suit" design ever caught on - it's hard to believe that a man would render himself that inaccessible, unless dry humping was the preferred method.

(Transcript of dialogue)

"Old Flappy-Pants-Pappy Himself!"

Pete: Can the comedy, will you? These suit me, and I like 'em. . . get it? They're Munsingwear "BREEX". They're bias-cut, with as much room and comfort behind as anybody needs. . . and what about that stingy little number you got on?

Mac: Stingy, my eye! You mean streamlined, modern. . . what a getting-around guy needs. Munsingwear, too. . . these SKIT-Shorts, with the new, easy "Stretchy-Seat" that stretches up and down.

(Transcript of dialogue)

Fred:  Gladiator! Stick to your putting! Nothing could be more comfortable than these SKIT-Trunks! They're brief enough. . . without making you look as if you'd joined a nudist colony!

Pete: Oh, yeah? Well. . . next to my skin I like air. Look at the leg-room here! And these give mild support, too!

It's strange, because I can't imagine the gayest man in the world (Elton John?) discussing "leg-room" and "mild support" (not to mention "stretchy-seat") with ANYONE, even the cutest pool-boy in the world. It's just so. . . not even gay - it's something else - just. . . disturbing.

Yet it's obvious it isn't meant to be gay. I mean, they wouldn't. I mean. . . would they?

I swear, this guy's butt looks like something out of an old Playtex girdle ad from the 1960s. Unless he has a thigh problem, and men don't usually have cellulite, I just don't get the shorts-like design of these. In fact I don't see how ANYONE could wear one of these, except maybe Ed Wood in his Glen or Glenda phase. He might get in a car accident, after all, and the doctor pronouncing him dead would see it.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Amazing grace: Kevin Rudd's act of faith

Kevin Rudd launches passionate defence of gay marriage

Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, a devout Christian, has stared down a pastor on live television and cited scripture while delivering a stirring defence of gay marriage.

In footage that has since gone viral on the internet, Mr Rudd declared that "people don't choose their sexuality" and said if The Bible were taken literally, slavery would still be legal.

His impassioned defence of his decision to throw his support behind same sex marriage came in response to a Christian pastor who asked on a chat show featuring audience questions: "Kevin, if you call yourself a Christian, why don't you believe the words of Jesus in The Bible?"

Mr Rudd, facing defeat in Australia's election on Saturday, responded: "Well mate if I was going to have that view, The Bible also says that slavery is a natural condition. Because St Paul said in the New Testament: slaves be obedient to your masters. And therefore we should have all fought for the confederacy in the US Civil War. I mean for goodness sake. The human condition and social conditions change."

Mr Rudd said be believed his decision to support gay marriage was in line with The Bible's emphasis on "universal love".

"I concluded in my conscience, through an informed conscience and a Christian conscience, it was the right thing to do," he told ABC TV's Q&A show.

This amazing four minutes is making the rounds. It proves that it's possible to have a lightbulb come on regarding your former beliefs, not just flip-flopping to garner votes but realizing in the clear light of day that human beings in all their diversity deserve compassion, understanding and a fair shake.

The glazed eyes and bolted doors apparent in the faces of the audience speak volumes about their own limited beliefs, and this misguided pastor with the ominous "Republic" shirt (?) seems ill at ease and even afraid. Rudd speaks with poise, confidence, and heartfelt conviction, and with a refreshing absence of shouting, fist-pounding and empty rhetoric. 

After studying it formally for 15 years and even teaching classes, I know my Bible pretty well, and I challenge conservative Christians to find any kind of statement from Jesus on homosexuality. It simply isn't there. And yes, Saint Paul, who could pound fists with the best of them, not only stated that slaves should obey their masters, but that wives should "submit themselves" to their husbands! Rudd didn't need to pull this one out, and to his credit he didn't, but he certainly could have. 

Does this mean we should just toss the Bible away as irrelevant to 2013 and all its multiplicity of views?  In the words of theologian Marcus Borg, it's possible to take scripture "seriously, but not literally." I think that Jesus so embodied near-unthinkable changes in human consciousness that he was put to death for it.  But who has that sort of guts, these days?

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

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When gay really ISN'T OK

A Mother's Horror Story

From a web site called PFOX:       http://pfox.org/default.html

My precious son was raped by a boy in the neighborhood when he was 9-10 years old.  It happened after he returned home on the bus when I was still at work, an hour or so before I got home. I thought this older, nice teen was giving my son attention, playing ball with him, etc. -- as he never got that attention from his own dad. Even though I spoke to my kids, read books on "bad touch" etc. & was an educator--it didn't "take" with this one son. I've had well meaning Christians condemn me as not doing enough & that I'd not been a good mother or my boy "would have told me" when it happened. But I have peace that this accusation is absurd--as I was in a living hell with an abusive husband & I gave every ounce of love to my children that I could. However, I was married when not a Christian & his blood dad is a non-believer who did drugs & had a huge anger problem, putting us "in fear" in our home.

I came to Christ shortly after our marriage & did all of the Christian training of the kids myself, standing for almost 20 years for the marriage. My other kids are all strong Christians.....but my son fell away from the Lord during high school. This happened when a gay drama "teacher" (not certified but hired under adjunct faculty with other gays) became too "familiar "with my boy---later I found out he proselytized him along with those gay teachers into the hidden world of homosexuality (1990's).

No one listened to me when I complained to the principal & school district about this gay man’s behavior towards my teenage son at school.  Instead, the school began to use my son as a "poster boy," writing articles/editorials on being gay & accepted at their politically correct high school. His dad (who was gone when my son was 15.. ..& divorced me), and a group of liberal parents in the acting/drama world encouraged my son that "he was gay or bi". This, after he broke up with his girlfriend when he was 15--deeply distraught & crying for weeks over the loss.

There are so many stories I could share in retrospect as I ponder "what could I have done differently". Yet, today, I know I did all I could with what I knew as a loving mother---but no one would listen to me at the school. In addition, I knew little about the dark world (& it IS DARK) of homosexuality as I'd not been exposed to anything like this in my life. But now I have spent more time in the gay bars, clubs (as I go with my son, counsel kids over a dinner, have them over to our home, etc) than the average older Christian. My present husband & I have spent countless hours counseling & loving this community of hurting individuals....& it is a privilege--in spite of not always being easy. 

My son, who is now an adult and whose life thus far has been ravaged, had been my strongest Christian kid--shared Christ at school, sang worship with me, was a straight A student, leader & dynamic believer. He is still friends with the gay teacher--who was finally fired with a district cover up--as he apparently was caught doing drugs with his students.

This gay teacher still holds my son captive...stalking and finding him in other states and now back in our city—he had moved my son into his home.  This teacher has gone back on drugs and stolen from my boy (last year). We have rescued my son from this guy's home...& now this man went thru rehab again pulling our boy back into his clutches this year.

Our son is like a "stockholm syndrome child"----feeling sorry for this former teacher & saying. "he was there for me & cared about me when I was young & hurting". Our son has swallowed the whole party line of GAY EVANGELISM & believes it all--even only attending gay AA meetings with his "people". It is similar to a cult. It's all sick/drama/victim mentality & perversity...full of drag queen stuff as well.

(Transcript of text: "I make choices everyday (sic). Where to eat. What to wear. Who to see. But as a gay man I never thought I could change WHO I was. Until I realized change was a choice. . . and I chose to change from gay to straight. It may not be a decision you want to make, but you should know thousands of us already have. Please respect our choice.")

ONLY GOD........

Only God will hold your molecules together in the grief of it all. Only God will have every answer to each situation & in those times of confusion, help us continue to walk by faith and not by sight. Only God will comfort us through the deepest of sorrows. Only God can make a way where there is no other way. Only God loves our son, daughter, spouse-- more than we do, as our loved one.  Only God will bring the perfect conclusion of the matter. Only God will bring Peace amid the storm. Only God can take the perversity, insanity and constant death of the homosexual agenda that is ravaging lives, families and our culture to its end game- BECAUSE OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, THE ALPHA AND THE OMEGA, THE BEGINNING AND THE END, THE FIRST AND THE LAST IS OUR OVERCOMER, AND HE HAS THE FINAL VICTORY.

-- PFOX mom of a sexually abused son

This is a dramatic cutdown of a piece that just went on and on, from a site called PFOX, standing for I-don't-know-what. The other day I posted about Exodus "ex-gay" ministries folding because the founder suddenly realized after 15 years of damaging people with guilt trips that "maybe this ex-gay stuff doesn't work quite as well as we thought it did". But obviously, the agenda hasn't disappeared.

The way gays are demonized in this piece is pretty horrific, but this is a woman who needs someone to blame for the fact that her kid is fucked up. Being gay isn't the problem. She seems to believe he has as much individual will as a jellyfish, so easily is he taken over by demonic influences like high school drama teachers.  She takes no responsibility for how damaged he is and sees her rampant right-wing version of Christianity as the cure for everything that she perceives is wrong with him.

All through reading this amazing rant and tearing out chunk after redundant chunk so I could post it, I was reminded of Sheldon Cooper's fundamentalist Christian mother on The Big Bang Theory. It's never spelled out that Sheldon is gay (though Jim Parsons seems comfortably "out"), so his mother doesn't have too much to work with except his physics-induced atheism and extreme attachment to his Mee Maw (grandmother), who calls him Moon Pie. Now, does that sound heterosexual to you?

Moving on.

In spite of much rhetorical fancy dancing and the legions of gay ministers in the United Church, I don't think the gay/Christian schism will ever entirely heal. In fact, I think it could get wider as the BLT-with-a-side-of-fries community (sorry, I can't ever remember all those initials) becomes more visible. Even "tolerant" Christians (and what does it mean if I "tolerate' you? Really, that I can barely stand you) stop short of believing God is "OK" with all this, that it isn't a sin.  The Bible tells us to stick to the good old model, the Adam-and-Eve, penis-in-vagina, John-Wayne-on-a-horse idea that kept our civilization strong ever since Adam toted his Flintstones lunch pail to the gravel pit.

Supposedly. It has always interested me however that there is not one word against homosexuality in the New Testament. Not one word FOR, either. Jesus must have had more important matters to attend to.

Homosexuality has always been around, persecuted to one extent or another because people don't understand it. Now that a percentage of gays and other BLTs are "out", the more conservative faction of society is even more baffled because they aren't used to seeing men marching in parades with fake boobs and hair extensions. 

I had an issue with drag queens - namely, that they were way more feminine than I am, though I have actual boobs - until I decided to forget my envy and just enjoy their joie de vivre and dazzling fashion sense. I may not get it, I mean really understand why they do it, but why do I have to? I've seen some pre-Stonewall footage of gay protestors, and someone must've told them they all had to wear suits and ties (even the women). It was so dull, passersby probably thought they were just a bunch of disgruntled Rotarians.

At a certain point you have to ask yourself if sexual orientation is really our call, if we have the right to dictate how somebody else "should" feel about other people. I like what my daughter, a TV news reporter, once said. "Why should we disapprove when it's something that has no ill effect on us whatsoever?" What horrific damage will be done if people of the same sex like to hang out together, go to the gym, fall in love, get married, adopt children and. . .WOAH! That's where a lot of people put on the brakes.

But the thing is, as the definition of family becomes more soft-bordered and inclusive, it will happen. In fact, it already is. As usual, celebrities (who are, of course, the epitome of stability intelligence and good taste) lead the way. What will the long-term social impact be? Hell if I know. But it has to be better than having the shit kicked out of you for having Justin Bieber on your lunch pail.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

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