by Editors

	Neo-Contentions II Brokeback Mountain Matters…

 

The theocratic, evangelical, neo-contrived war on America’s homosexual citizens and movement for Republican political posturing and Christian bloc-vote manipulation.

 

 

INTRODUCTORY NOTE:

 

“Neo-Contentions” remains the caption for this second offering in a series  wherein Democratswrite.com contributors will share their website as a forum for debate between and among liberal and conservative minds, and minds machinating in between those politically polar opposites.  

 

This second offering obtains lift-off from B.E.A. founder, Robert (Dusty) Schoch (incidentally, our foreign-policy editor).  What becomes the “Neo-Contentions”  bone of contention is a lengthy article written by one Ronald G. Lee and published in what Schoch maintains is a covert, fifth-column neo-con covey within the alleged “moderate” Catholic community—The New Oxford Review, which you can peruse on the web at http://www.newoxfordreview.org/  .  The Lee article is available on the N.O.R. website, but at a price (you’ll have to subscribe or pay $1.50 for the Lee article, which you won’t have to spend now that the N.O.R. have each given their permission for us to print for you here and now the article verbatim as it appeared in February on the N.O.R. website.)

 

Ronald Lee is a librarian in Houston, and a (previously) self-admitted homosexual who contends that all homosexuals are going to spend time in Purgatory and, unless they repent, Catholic Hell.  In a very lengthy and arguably erudite piece of belabored socio-psycho-theocratic exegesis babble, entitled , “The Truth About the Homosexual Rights Movement”, Lee vents his fifth-column diatribe against America’s homosexual minority.

 

Why is it important to respond to and debate this theological bashing of our homosexual citizenry?  The answer is disturbingly obvious and essentially in two parts: First-  It was GW Bush’s Christian posturings (on the issues of gay marriage, abortion etc.) that got him elected with the blessed bloc voting of America’s increasingly-fundamentalist Christian (including Catholic) community.  It was his election that enabled the neo-cons to take us  Saudi rabbit hunting in Afghanistan,  wage petro-war in Iraq and bankrupt our nation fiscally and politically.  The vital importance of the gay issues in this increasingly theocratic country, whose former bastians separating church and state are crumbling,  is as obvious as the theocratic condemnations of homosexuality are hypocritical, contends Schoch.  Second, the Neo-Con Catholic and Fundamentalist Christian condemnation of Faithful Christian Homosexuals is not only not nice—It is as Un-Christ-like as Hell.

 

Schoch initially submitted his article, entitled “Lee v. Lobo” (explained later herein) for publication by the New Oxford Press as an “independent and balanced” counterpointed composition.  (Regarding his self-applied stamp as “independent and balanced”, Schoch still detests the label “liberal” because he sincerely considers his own polemics “conservative” expressions, polarized “left” of former center by the electrovalent  processes of former Republican elements corrosively transmogrifying  into the monolithic, Neo-Conservative, war-mongering radical (fascistic) element they  are today. )

 

Primarily a commentator on foreign policy, Schoch tendered his counterpoint piece to the Catholic on-line magazine (N.O.R.) explaining that a recent personal experience involving the caustic effect of Catholic condemnation of Christian homosexuals provided additional fuel for his critical composition.  The N.O.R. editors, for a period of over two weeks, considered two successive drafts of Schoch’s essay on Catholic hypocrisy regarding homosexuality within and without the ranks and walls of Catholicism, and ultimately refused to publish either.  Schoch suggests each reader give a fair reading of the Lee and his own articles, both of which are published hereinafter without deletion or abridgement, and then, after looking over the N.O.R. website as a whole, decide why Schoch’s article was editorially eschewed by the good folks at the N.O.R. helm. 

 

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN BLUES…

 

In coming to your own decision, consider Schoch’s “personal motives” which factored in to his submitting the article (to the N.O.R.) in the first place,  by reading excerpts from his correspondence with this Catholic on-line forum and magazine.  Some of Schoch’s disclosures to the N.O.R. included….

 

. . . “The gay friend (of Schoch’s) for whose benefit (along with others in his position) I (Schoch) wrote this essay had been quite hurt when his orthodox and pious Catholic friend sent him Lee’s rant on the homosexual movement.  The rant includes many statements of orthodox Catholic “consensus” that my friend is going to hell (and purgatory on the way) for his homosexuality, quite apart from his involvement in the gay or homosexual “movements”.  My friend is a truly devout (Baptist) Christian.  Within the same month his friend sent him the Lee article from your website, he suffered, as a Christian homosexual an even more soul-searing experience.  He (an unmarried man) … was attending church a few weeks back with…(a beloved family member)  with  other dear friends… also in attendance, when the preacher chose that Sunday to poll the congregation on whether they wanted gays in the future to be forbidden (as he apparently did)  to attend their services. Sin, fire and brimstone were thrown in the sermon righteously  scorning all homosexuals.  My friend’s kin and others in the congregation know my friend is gay.  They were all embarrassed and hurt on his behalf having to sit and endure that sanctimonious and hypocritical sermon and call for consensus condemnation.  What the family did not know was that the very preacher giving the sermon was himself homosexual and had had homosexual sex with my friend very recently…and in fact had been surfing the internet the previous night, using a coded pseudonym my friend is familiar with, for “new” homosexual prospects…

Heaping cruel insult on top of that soul-searing injury, the Catholic who sent my friend Lee’s diatribe against the homosexual movement, is himself a closeted gay, who is in reality the “type” of closeted homosexual I am writing about in my responsive (to Lee’s article) essay.

There’s no doubt that what is happening to my gay friend in the microcosm is akin to what homosexuals have suffered from orthodox “religions” throughout history.   Hitler’s being a closeted gay IS RELEVANT, (and ironic).  The Catholic Church’s intramural endorsement (by housing, ordination and turning their authoritative backs on homosexuals in the ranks of the priesthood, sisterhood, etc.) while publicly denouncing homosexuality as sin (in the same way Hitler did) are relevant matters which I sincerely believe should be published in response to and balance for  the inordinately long and judgmental rant you published for Ronald Lee.”  …

 

 

 

So, for PART 1 OF THIS NEO-CONTENTIONS INSTALMENT NUMBER II, read (and rue) Ronald Lee’s Neo-con Catholic diatribe against all his fellow homosexuals, and, curiously against a tiny and conservative little gay book shop in Austin Texas, named “Lobo’s Book Store”.   Schoch, in his counterpoint essay to follow, refers to Lee’s article and his own essay rebutting it as the case of “Lee v. Lobo.”

 

Schoch asks that we consider him “devils advocate” in this aberrational theocratic crusade to bash homosexuals in the Christian faith.  He wishes to defend the little homosexual book store in Austin and homosexuals everywhere against the concerted  and hypocritical condemnation on part of the fundamental Christian faiths in America who are with increasing stealth and effectiveness  attempting to garner support for a fascist neo-con administration, waging (oil) acquisitive—and clearly(if ironically) anti-Christian–wars against non-Christian peoples in the Middle East.  We need to be constantly vigilant and industrious in de-constructing these edifices of hatred that serve to empower those who would wage genocidal wars of unprovoked aggression in the name of “crusading” in the holy wars of “Armageddon”.  Gay-bashing is part of this program of neo-conning America’s provincial fundamentalists into believing George Bush is a righteous man and rational leader because, like them, he’s opposed to what they’re opposed to,  and for what they’re for…at least on any given Sunday.

 

So, first, muster all the Christian righteousness, piety… and PATIENCE you can muster and, try to imaging yourself a devout Christian, gay man, reading the following debriefing and dissertation on your homosexuality, and your place as such in Catholic Purgatory and, possibly Hell…..

 

 

 

 

 

 

PART 1 (POINT)

 

THE NEO-CON VIEW FROM BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN

 

 

“The Truth About the Homosexual Rights Movement “

New Oxford Review (Feb.  8,  2006)

By Ronald G. Lee

Ed. Note: This article contains an honest description of the homosexual “lifestyle.” If you don’t want to read such accounts, DO NOT READ THIS ARTICLE. If you do read it, don’t send us a letter of complaint. You’ve been forewarned. 

There was a “gay” bookstore called Lobo’s in Austin, Texas, when I was living there as a grad student. The layout was interesting. Looking inside from the street all you saw were books. It looked like any other bookstore. There was a section devoted to classic “gay” fiction by writers such as Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, and W.H. Auden. There were biographies of prominent “gay” icons, some of whom, like Walt Whitman, would probably have accepted the homosexual label, but many of whom, like Whitman’s idol, President Lincoln, had been commandeered for the cause on the basis of evidence no stronger than a bad marriage or an intense same-sex friendship. There were impassioned modern “gay” memoirs, and historical accounts of the origins and development of the “gay rights” movement. It all looked so innocuous and disarmingly bourgeois. But if you went inside to browse, before long you noticed another section, behind the books, a section not visible from the street. The pornography section. Hundreds and hundreds of pornographic videos, all involving men, but otherwise catering to every conceivable sexual taste or fantasy. And you would notice something else too. There were no customers in the front. All the customers were in the back, rooting through the videos. As far as I know, I am the only person who ever actually purchased a book at Lobo’s. The books were, in every sense of the word, a front for the porn.

So why waste thousands of dollars on books that no one was going to buy? It was clear from the large “on sale” section that only a pitifully small number of books were ever purchased at their original price. The owners of Lobo’s were apparently wasting a lot of money on gay novels and works of gay history, when all the real money was in pornography. But the money spent on books wasn’t wasted. It was used to purchase a commodity that is more precious than gold to the gay rights establishment. Respectability. Respectability and the appearance of normalcy. Without that investment, we would not now be engaged in a serious debate about the legalization of same-sex “marriage.” By the time I lived in Austin, I had been thinking of myself as a gay man for almost 20 years. Based on the experience acquired during those years, I recognized in Lobo’s a metaphor for the strategy used to sell gay rights to the American people, and for the sordid reality that strategy concealed.

This is how I “deconstruct” Lobo’s. There are two kinds of people who are going to be looking in through the window: those who are tempted to engage in homosexual acts, and those who aren’t. To those who aren’t, the shelves of books transmit the message that gay people are no different from anyone else, that homosexuality is not wrong, just different. Since most of them will never know more about homosexuality than what they learned looking in the window, that impression is of the greatest political and cultural importance, because on that basis they will react without alarm, or even with active support, to the progress of gay rights. There are millions of well-meaning Americans who support gay rights because they believe that what they see looking in at Lobo’s is what is really there. It does not occur to them that they are seeing a carefully stage-managed effort to manipulate them, to distract them from a truth they would never condone.

For those who are tempted to engage in homosexual acts, the view from the street is also consoling. It makes life as a homosexual look safe and unthreatening. Normal, in other words. Sooner or later, many of these people will stop looking in through the window and go inside. Unlike the first sort of window-shopper, they won’t be distracted by the books for long. They will soon discover the existence of the porn section. And no matter how distasteful they might find the idea at first (if indeed they do find it distasteful), they will also notice that the porn section is where all the customers are. And they will feel sort of silly standing alone among the books. Eventually, they will find their way back to the porn, with the rest of the customers. And like them, they will start rooting through the videos. And, gentle reader, that is where most of them will spend the rest of their lives, until God or AIDS, drugs or alcohol, suicide or a lonely old age, intervenes.

Ralph McInerny once offered a brilliant definition of the gay rights movement: self-deception as a group effort. Nevertheless, deception of the general public is also vital to the success of the cause. And nowhere are the forms of deception more egregious, or more startlingly successful, than in the campaign to persuade Christians that, to paraphrase the title of a recent book, Jesus Was Queer, and churches should open their doors to same-sex lovers. The gay Christian movement relies on a stratagem that is as daring as it is dishonest. I know, because I was taken in by it for a long time. Like the owners of Lobo’s, success depends on camouflaging the truth, which is hidden in plain view the whole time. It is no wonder The Wizard of Oz is so resonant among homosexuals. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” could be the motto and the mantra of the whole movement.

No single book was as influential in my own coming out as the now ex-Father John McNeill’s 1976 “classic” The Church and the Homosexual. That book is to Dignity what “The Communist Manifesto” was to Soviet Russia. Most of the book is devoted to offering alternative interpretations of the biblical passages condemning homosexuality, and to putting the anti-homosexual writings of the Church Fathers and scholastics into historical context in a way that renders them irrelevant and even offensive to modern readers. The first impression of a naïve and sexually conflicted young reader such as myself was that McNeill had offered a plausible alternative to traditional teaching. It made me feel justified in deciding to come out of the closet. Were his arguments persuasive? Frankly, I didn’t care, and I don’t believe most of McNeill’s readers do either. They were couched in the language of scholarship, and they sounded plausible. That was all that mattered.

McNeill, like most of the members of his camp, treated the debate over homosexuality as first and foremost a debate about the proper interpretation of texts, texts such as the Sodom story in the Bible and the relevant articles of the Summa. The implication was that once those were reinterpreted, or rendered irrelevant, the gay rights apologists had prevailed, and the door was open for practicing homosexuals to hold their heads up high in church. And there is a certain sense in which that has proved to be true. To the extent that the debate has focused on interpreting texts, the gay apologists have won for themselves a remarkable degree of legitimacy. But that is because, as anyone familiar with the history of Protestantism should be aware, the interpretation of texts is an interminable process. The efforts of people such as McNeill don’t need to be persuasive. They only need to be useful.

This is how it works. McNeill reinterprets the story of Sodom, claiming that it does not condemn homosexuality, but gang rape. Orthodox theologians respond, in a commendable but naïve attempt to rebut him, naïve because these theologians presume that McNeill believes his own arguments, and is writing as a scholar, not as a propagandist. McNeill ignores the arguments of his critics, dismissing their objections as based on homophobia, and repeats his original position. The orthodox respond again as if they were really dealing with a theologian. And back and forth for a few more rounds. Until finally McNeill or someone like him stands up and announces, “You know, this is getting us nowhere. We have our exegesis and our theology. You have yours. Why can’t we just agree to disagree?” That sounds so reasonable, so ecumenical. And if the orthodox buy into it, they have lost, because the gay rights apologists have earned a place at the table from which they will never be dislodged. Getting at the truth about Sodom and Gomorrah, or correctly parsing the sexual ethics of St. Thomas, was never really the issue. Winning admittance to Holy Communion was the issue.

Even as a naïve young man, one aspect of The Church and the Homosexual struck me as odd. Given that McNeill was suggesting a radical revision of the traditional Catholic sexual ethic, there was almost nothing in it about sexual ethics. The Catholic sexual ethic is quite specific about the ends of human sexuality, and about the forms of behavior that are consistent with those ends. McNeill’s criticism of the traditional ethic occupied most of his book, but he left the reader with only the vaguest idea about what he proposed to put in its place. For that matter, there was almost nothing in it about the real lives of real homosexuals. Homosexuality was treated throughout the book as a kind of intellectual abstraction. But I was desperate to get some idea of what was waiting for me on the other side of the closet door. And with no one but Fr. McNeill for a guide, I was reduced to reading between the lines. There was a single passage that I interpreted as a clue. It was almost an aside, really. At one point, he commented that monogamous same-sex unions were consistent with the Church’s teaching, or at least consistent with the spirit of the renewed and renovated post-Vatican II Church. With nothing else to go on, I interpreted this in a prescriptive sense. I interpreted McNeill to be arguing that homogenital acts were only moral when performed in the context of a monogamous relationship. And furthermore, I leapt to what seemed like the reasonable conclusion that the author was aware of such relationships, and that I had a reasonable expectation of finding such a relationship myself. Otherwise, for whose benefit was he writing? I was not so naïve (although I was pretty naïve) as not to be aware of the existence of promiscuous homosexual men. But McNeill’s aside, which, I repeat, contained virtually his only stab at offering a gay sexual ethic, led me to believe that in addition to the promiscuous, there existed a contingent of gay men who were committed to living in monogamy. Otherwise, Fr. McNeill was implicitly defending promiscuity. And the very idea of a priest defending promiscuity was inconceivable to me. (Yes, that naïve.)

Several years ago, McNeill published an autobiography. In it, he makes no bones about his experiences as a sexually active Catholic priest — a promiscuous, sexually active, homosexual Catholic priest. He writes in an almost nostalgic fashion about his time spent hunting for sex in bars. Although he eventually did find a stable partner (while he was still a priest), he never apologizes for his years of promiscuity, or even so much as alludes to the disparity between his own life and the passage in The Church and the Homosexual that meant so much to me. It is possible that he doesn’t even remember suggesting that homosexuals were supposed to remain celibate until finding monogamous relationships. It is obvious that he never meant that passage to be taken seriously, except by those who would never do more than look in the window — in others words, gullible, well-meaning, non-homosexual Catholics, preferably those in positions of authority. Or, equally naïve and gullible young men such as me who were looking for a reason to act on their sexual desires, preferably one that did not do too much violence to their consciences, at least not at first. The latter, the writer presumed, would eventually find their way back to the porn section, where their complicity in the scam would render them indistinguishable from the rest of the regular customers. Clearly, there was a reason that in the earlier book he wrote so little about the real lives of real homosexuals, such as himself.

I don’t see how the contradiction between The Church and the Homosexual and the autobiography could be accidental. Why would McNeill pretend to believe that homosexuals should restrict themselves to sex within the context of monogamous relationships when his life demonstrates that he did not? I can think of only one reason. Because he knew that if he told the truth, his cause would be dead in the water. Although to this day McNeill, like all gay Christian propagandists, avoids the subject of sexual ethics as if it were some sort of plague, his life makes his real beliefs clear. He believes in unrestricted sexual freedom. He believes that men and women should have the right to couple, with whomever they want, whenever they want, however they want, and as often as they want. He would probably add some sort of meaningless bromide about no one getting hurt and both parties being treated with respect, but anyone familiar with the snake pit of modern sexual culture (both heterosexual and homosexual) will know how seriously to take that. And he knew perfectly well that if he were honest about his real aims, there would be no Dignity, there would be no gay Christian movement, at least not one with a snowball’s chance in Hell of succeeding. That would be like getting rid of the books and letting the casual window-shoppers see the porn. And we can’t have that now, can we? In other words, the ex-Fr. McNeill is a bad priest and a con man. And given the often lethal consequences of engaging in homosexual sex, a con man with blood on his hands.

Let me be clear. I believe that McNeill’s real beliefs, as deduced from his actual behavior, and distinguished from the arguments he puts forward for the benefit of the naïve and gullible, represent the real aims and objectives of the homosexual rights movement. They are the porn that the books are meant to conceal. In other words, if you support what is now described in euphemistic terms as “the blessing of same-sex unions,” in practice you are supporting the abolition of the entire Christian sexual ethic, and its substitution with an unrestricted, laissez faire, free sexual market. The reason that the homosexual rights movement has managed to pick up such a large contingent of heterosexual fellow-travelers is simple: Because once that taboo is abrogated, no taboos are left. I once heard a heterosexual Episcopalian put it this way: If I don’t want the church poking its nose into my bedroom, how can I condone it when it limits the sexual freedom of homosexuals? That might sound outrageous, but if you still believe that the debate is over the religious status of monogamous same-sex relationships, please be prepared to point out one church somewhere in the U.S. that has opened its doors to active homosexuals without also opening them to every other form of sexual coupling imaginable. I am too old to be taken in by “Father” McNeill and his abstractions anymore. Show me.

A few years ago, I subscribed to the Dignity Yahoo group on the Internet. There were at that time several hundred subscribers. At one point, a confused and troubled young man posted a question to the group: Did any of the subscribers attach any value to monogamy? I immediately wrote back that I did. A couple of days later the young man wrote back to me. He had received dozens of responses, some of them quite hostile and demeaning, and all but one — mine — telling him to go out and get laid because that was what being gay was all about. (This was a gay “Catholic” group.) He did not know what to make of it because none of the propaganda to which he was exposed before coming out prepared him for what was really on the other side of the closet door. I had no idea what to tell him, because at the time I was still caught up in the lie myself. Now, the solution seems obvious. What I should have written back to him was, “You have been lied to. Ask God for forgiveness and get back to Kansas as fast as you can. Auntie Em is waiting.”

In light of all the legitimate concern about Internet pornography, it might seem ironic to assert that the Internet helped rescue me from homosexuality. For twenty years, I thought there was something wrong with me. Dozens of well-meaning people assured me that there was a whole, different world of homosexual men out there, a world that for some reason I could never find, a world of God-fearing, straight-acting, monogamy-believing, and fidelity-practicing homosexuals. They assured me that they themselves knew personally (for a fact and for real) that such men existed. They themselves knew such men (or at least had heard tell of them from those who did). And I believed it, although as the years passed it got harder and harder. Then I got a personal computer and a subscription to AOL. “O.K.,” I reasoned, “morally conservative homosexuals are obviously shy and skittish and fearful of sudden movements. They don’t like bars and bathhouses. Neither do I. They don’t attend Dignity meetings or Metropolitan Community Church services because the gay ‘churches’ are really bathhouses masquerading as houses of worship. But there is no reason a morally conservative homosexual cannot subscribe to AOL and submit a profile. If I can do it, anyone can do it.” So I did it. I wrote a profile describing myself as a conservative Catholic (comme ci, comme ça) who loved classical music and theater and good books and scintillating conversation about all of the above. I said I wanted very much to meet other like-minded homosexuals for the purposes of friendship and romance. I tried to be as clear as I knew how. I was not interested in one night stands. And within minutes of placing the profile, I got my first response. It consisted of three words: “How many inches?” My experience of looking for love on AOL went downhill rapidly from there.

When I first came out in the 1980s, it was common for gay rights apologists to blame the promiscuity among gay men on “internalized homophobia.” Gay men, like African Americans, internalized and acted out the lies about themselves learned from mainstream American culture. Furthermore, homosexuals were forced to look for love in dimly lit bars, bathhouses, and public parks for fear of harassment at the hands of a homophobic mainstream. The solution to this problem, we were told, was permitting homosexuals to come out into the open, without fear of retribution. A variant of this argument is still put forward by activists such as Andrew Sullivan, in order to legitimate same-sex marriage. And it seemed reasonable enough twenty years ago. But thirty-five years have passed since the infamous Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York, the Lexington and Concord of the gay liberation movement. During that time, homosexuals have carved out for themselves public spaces in every major American city, and many of the minor ones as well. They have had the chance to create whatever they wanted in those spaces, and what have they created? New spaces for locating sexual partners.

There is another reason, apart from the propaganda value, that bookstores like Lobo’s peddle porn as well as poetry. Because without the porn, they would soon go out of business. And, in fact, most gay bookstores have gone out of business, despite the porn. Following an initial burst of enthusiasm in the 1970s and 80s, gay publishing went into steep decline, and shows no signs of coming out of it. Once the novelty wore off, gay men soon bored of reading about men having sex with one another, preferring to devote their time and disposable income to pursuing the real thing. Gay and lesbian community centers struggle to keep their doors open. Gay churches survive as places where worshippers can go to sleep it off and cleanse their soiled consciences after a Saturday night spent cruising for sex at the bars. And there is no danger of ever hearing a word from the pulpit suggesting that bar-hopping is inconsistent with believing in the Bible. When I lived in the United Kingdom, I was struck by the extent to which gay culture in London replicated gay culture in the U.S. The same was true in Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Homosexuality is one of America’s most successful cultural exports. And the focus on gay social spaces in Europe is identical to their focus in America: sex. Cyberspace is now the latest conquest of that amazing modern Magellan: the male homosexual in pursuit of new sexual conquests.

But at this point, how is it possible to blame the promiscuity among homosexual men on homophobia, internalized or otherwise? On the basis of evidence no stronger than wishful thinking, Andrew Sullivan wants us to believe that legalizing same-sex “marriage” will domesticate gay men, that all that energy now devoted to building bars and bathhouses will be dedicated to erecting picket fences and two-car garages. What Sullivan refuses to face is that male homosexuals are not promiscuous because of “internalized homophobia,” or laws banning same-sex “marriage.” Homosexuals are promiscuous because when given the choice, homosexuals overwhelmingly choose to be promiscuous. And wrecking the fundamental social building block of our civilization, the family, is not going to change that.

I once read a disarmingly honest essay in which Sullivan as much as admitted his real reason for promoting the cause of same-sex “marriage.” He faced up to the sometimes sordid nature of his sexual life, which is more than most gay activists are prepared to do, and he regretted it. He wished he had led a different sort of life, and he apparently believes that if marriage were a legal option, he might have been able to do so. I have a lot more respect for Andrew Sullivan than I do for most gay activists. I believe that he would seriously like to reconcile his sexual desires with the demands of his conscience. But with all due respect, are the rest of us prepared to sacrifice the institution of the family in the unsubstantiated hope that doing so will make it easier for Sullivan to keep his trousers zipped?

But isn’t it theoretically possible that homosexuals could restrict themselves to something resembling the traditional Catholic sexual ethic, except for the part about procreation — in other words, monogamous lifelong relationships? Of course it is theoretically possible. It was also theoretically possible in 1968 that the use of contraceptives could be restricted to married couples, that the revolting downward slide into moral anarchy we have lived through could have been avoided. It is theoretically possible, but it is practically impossible. It is impossible because the whole notion of stable sexual orientation on which the gay rights movement is founded has no basis in fact.

René Girard, the French literary critic and sociologist of religion, argues that all human civilization is founded on desire. All civilizations have surrounded the objects of desire (including sexual desire) with an elaborate and unbreachable wall of taboos and restrictions. Until now. What we are seeing in the modern West is not the long overdue legitimization of hitherto despised but honorable forms of human love. What we are witnessing is the reduction of civilization to its lowest common denominator: unbridled and unrestricted desire. To assert that we have opened a Pandora’s Box would be a stunning understatement. Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen, it looks to be a bumpy millennium.

When I was growing up, we were all presumed to be heterosexual. Then homosexuality was introduced as an alternative. That did not at first seem like a major revision because, apart from procreation, homosexuality, at least in theory, left the rest of the traditional sexual ethic in tact. Two people of the same gender could (in theory) fall in love and live a life of monogamous commitment. Then bisexuality was introduced, and the real implications of the sexual revolution became clear. Monogamy was out the window. Moral norms were out the window. Do-it-yourself sexuality became the norm. Anyone who wants to know what that looks like can do no better than go online. The Internet offers front row seats to the circus of a disintegrating civilization.

Take Yahoo, for example. Yahoo makes it possible for people sharing a common interest to create groups for the purpose of making contacts and sharing information. If that conjures up images of genealogists and stamp collectors, think again. There are now thousands of Yahoo groups catering to every kind of sexual perversion imaginable. Many of them would defy the imagination of the Marquis de Sade himself. People who until a few years ago could do nothing but fantasize now entertain serious hopes of acting out their fantasies. I met a man online whose fondest wish was to be spanked with a leather wallet. It had to be leather. And it had to be a wallet. And he needed to be spanked with it. Old-fashioned genital friction was optional. This man wanted a Gucci label tattooed across his backside. He could imagine no loftier pinnacle of passion. And he insisted that this desire was as fundamental to his sexual nature as the desire to go to bed with a man was for me. Furthermore, he had formed a Yahoo group that had more than three hundred members, all of whom shared the same passion. There is no object in the universe, no human or animal body part, that cannot be eroticized. So, is the desire to be spanked with a leather wallet a “sexual orientation”? If not, how is it different?

There was a time when I would have snorted, “Of course it is different. You can’t share a life with a leather wallet. You can’t love a leather wallet. What you are talking about is a fetish, not a sexual orientation. The two are completely different.” But the truth is that all the gay men I encountered had a fetish for naked male skin, with all the objectification and depersonalization that implies, that I now consider the distinction sophistical. Leather is skin too, after all. The only real difference between the fellow on the Internet and the average gay man is that he preferred his skin Italian, bovine, and tanned.

Over the years, I have attended various gay and gay-friendly church services. All of them shared one characteristic in common: a tacit agreement never to say a word from the pulpit — or from any other location for that matter — suggesting that there ought to be any restrictions on human sexual behavior. If anyone reading this is familiar with Dignity or Integrity or the Metropolitan Community churches or, for that matter, mainline Protestantism and most of post-Vatican II Catholicism, let me ask you one question: When was the last time you heard a sermon on sexual ethics? Have you ever heard a sermon on sexual ethics? I take it for granted that the answer is negative. Do our priests and pastors honestly believe that Christians in America are not in need of sermons on sexual ethics?

Here is the terrifying fact: If we as a nation and as a Church allow ourselves to be taken in by the scam of monogamous same-sex couples, we will be welcoming to our Communion rails (presuming that we still have Communion rails) not just the statistically insignificant number of same-sex couples who have lived together for more than a few years (most of whom purchased stability by jettisoning monogamy); we will also be legitimizing every kind of sexual taste, from old-fashioned masturbation and adultery to the most outlandish forms of sexual fetishism. We will, in other words, be giving our blessing to the suicide of Western civilization.

But what about all those images of loving same-sex couples dying to get hitched with which the media are awash these days? That used to confuse me too. It seems thatThe New York Times has no trouble finding successful same-sex partners to photograph and interview. But despite my best efforts, I was never able to meet the sorts of couples who show up regularly on Oprah. The media are biased and have no interest in telling the truth about homosexuality.

I met Wyatt (not his real name) online. For five years he was in a disastrous same-sex relationship. His partner was unfaithful, and an alcoholic with drug problems. The relationship was something that would give Strindberg nightmares. When Vermont legalized same-sex “marriage,” Wyatt saw it as one last chance to make their relationship work. He and his partner would fly to Vermont to get “married.” This came to the attention of the local newspaper in his area, which did a story with photos of the wedding reception. In it, Wyatt and his partner were depicted as a loving couple who finally had a chance to celebrate their commitment publicly. Nothing was said about the drugs or the alcoholism or the infidelity. But the marriage was a failure and ended in flames a few months later. And the newspaper did not do a follow-up. In other words, the leading daily of one of America’s largest cities printed a misleading story about a bad relationship, a story that probably persuaded more than one young man that someday he could be just as happy as Wyatt and his “partner.” And that is the sad part.

But one very seldom reads about people like my friend Harry. Harry (not his real name) was a balding, middle-aged man with a potbelly. He was married, and had a couple of grown daughters. And he was unhappy. Harry persuaded himself that he was unhappy because he was gay. He divorced his wife, who is now married to someone else, his daughters are not speaking to him, and he is discovering that pudgy, bald, middle-aged men are not all that popular in gay bars. Somehow, Oprah forgot to mention that. Now Harry is taking anti-depressants in order to keep from killing himself.

Then there was another acquaintance, who also happened to have the same name as the previous guy. Harry (not his real name) was about 30 (but could easily pass for 20), and from a Mormon background, with all the naïveté that suggests. Unlike the first Harry, he had no difficulty getting dates. Or relationships for that matter. The problem was that the relationships never lasted more than a couple of weeks. Harry was also rapidly developing a serious drinking problem. (So much for the Mormon words of wisdom.) If you happened to be at the bar around two in the morning, you could probably have Harry for the night if you were interested. He was so drunk he wouldn’t remember you the next day, and all he really wanted at that point was for someone to hold him.

Gay culture is a paradox. Most homosexuals tend to be liberal Democrats, or in the U.K., supporters of the Labour Party. They gravitate toward those Parties on the grounds that their policies are more compassionate and sensitive to the needs of the downtrodden and oppressed. But there is nothing compassionate about a gay bar. It represents a laissez faire free sexual market of the most Darwinian sort. There is no place in it for those who are not prepared to compete, and the rules of the game are ruthless and unforgiving. I remember once being in a gay pub in central London. Most of the men there were buff and toned and in their 20s or early 30s. An older gentleman walked in, who looked to be in his 70s. It was as if the Angel of Death himself had made an entrance. In that crowded bar, a space opened up around him that no one wanted to enter. His shadow transmitted contagion. It was obvious that his presence made the other customers nervous. He stood quietly at the bar and ordered a drink. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. When he eventually finished his drink and left, the sigh of relief from all those buff, toned pub crawlers was almost audible. Now all of them could go back to pretending that gay men were all young and beautiful forever. Gentle reader, do you know what a “bug chaser” is? A bug chaser is a young gay man who wants to contract HIV so that he will never grow old. And that is the world that Harry left his wife, and the other Harry his Church, to find happiness in.

I have known a lot of people like the two Harrys. But I have met precious few who bore more than a superficial resemblance to the idealized images we see in Oscar-winning movies such as Philadelphia, or in the magazine section of The New York Times. What I find suspicious is that the media ignore the existence of people like the two Harrys. The unhappiness so common among homosexuals is swept under the carpet, while fanciful and unrealistic “role models” are offered up for public consumption. There is at the very least grounds for a serious debate about the proposition that “gay is good,” but no such debate is taking place, because most of the mainstream media have already made up their (and our) minds.

But it is hard to hide the porn forever. When I was living in London, I had a wonderful friend named Maggie. Maggie (not her real name) was a liberal. Her big heart bled for the oppressed. Like most liberals, she was proud of her open-mindedness and wore it like a badge of honor. Maggie lived in a house as big as her heart and all of her children were grown up and had moved out. She had a couple of rooms to rent. It just so happened that both the young men who became her tenants were gay. Maggie’s first reaction was enthusiastic. She had never known many gay people, and thought the experience of renting to two homosexuals would confirm her in her open-mindedness. She believed it would be a learning experience. It was, but not the sort she had in mind. One day Maggie told me her troubles and confessed her doubts. She talked about what it was like to stumble each morning down to the breakfast table, finding two strangers seated there, the two strangers her tenants brought home the night before. It was seldom the same two strangers two mornings running. One of her tenants was in a long-distance relationship but, in the absence of his partner, felt at liberty to seek consolation elsewhere. She talked about what it was like to have to deal on a daily basis with the emotional turmoil of her tenants’ tumultuous lives. She told me what it was like to open the door one afternoon and find a policeman standing there, a policeman who was looking for one of her tenants, who was accused of trying to sell drugs to school children. That same tenant was also involved in prostitution. Maggie didn’t know what to make of it all. She desperately wanted to remain open-minded, to keep believing that gay men were no worse than anyone else, just different. But she couldn’t reconcile her experience with that “tolerant” assumption. The truth was that when the two finally moved out, an event to which she was looking forward with some enthusiasm, and it was time to place a new ad for rooms to let, she wanted to include the following proviso: Fags need not apply. I didn’t know what to tell Maggie because I was just as confused as she was. I wanted to hold on to my illusions too, in spite of all the evidence.

I am convinced that many, if not most, people who are familiar with the lives of homosexuals know the truth, but refuse to face it. My best friend got involved in the gay rights movement as a graduate student. He and a lesbian colleague sometimes counseled young men who were struggling with their sexuality. Once, the two of them met a young man who was seriously overweight and suffered from terrible acne. The young man waxed eloquent about the happiness he expected to find when he came out of the closet. He was going to find a partner, and the two of them would live happily ever after. The whole time my friend was thinking that if someone looking like this fat, pustulent young man ever walked into a bar, he would be folded, spindled, and mutilated before even taking a seat. Afterwards, the lesbian turned to him and said, “You know, sometimes it is better to stay in the closet.” My friend told me that for him this represented a decisive moment. This lesbian claimed to love and admire gay men. She never stopped praising their kindness and compassion and creativity. But with that one comment she in effect told my friend that she really knew what gay life was all about. It was about meat, and unless you were a good cut, don’t bother coming to the supermarket.

On another occasion, I was complaining to a lesbian about my disillusionment. She made a remarkable admission to me. She had a teenage son, who so far had not displayed signs of sexual interest in either gender. She knew as a lesbian she should not care which road he took. But she confessed to me that she did care. Based on the lives of the gay men she knew, she found herself secretly praying that her son would turn out to be straight. As a mother, she did not want to see her son living that life.

A popular definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing, while expecting a different result. That was me, the whole time I was laboring to become a happy homosexual. I was a lunatic. Several times I turned for advice to gay men who seemed better adjusted to their lot in life than I was. First, I wanted confirmation that my perceptions were accurate, that life as a male homosexual really was as awful as it seemed to be. And then I wanted to know what I was supposed to do about it. When was it going to get better? What could I do to make it better? I got two sorts of reactions to these questions, both of which left me feeling hurt and confused. The first sort of reaction was denial, often bitter denial, of what I was suggesting. I was told that there was something wrong with me, that most gay men were having a wonderful time, that I was generalizing on the basis of my own experience (whose experience was I supposed to generalize from?), and that I should shut up and stop bothering others with my “internalized homophobia.”

I began seeing a counselor when I was a graduate student. Matt (not his real name) was a happily married man with college-age children. All he knew about homosexuality he learned from the other members of his profession, who assured him that homosexuality was not a mental illness and that there were no good reasons that homosexuals could not lead happy, productive lives. When I first unloaded my tale of woe, Matt told me I had never really come out of the closet. (I still have no idea what he meant, but suspect it is like the “once saved, always saved” Baptist who responds to the lapsed by telling him that he was never really saved in the first place.) I needed to go back, he told me, try again, and continue to look for the positive experiences he was sure were available for me, on the basis of no other evidence than the rulings of the American Psychiatric Association. He had almost no personal experience of homosexuals, but his peers assured him that the book section at Lobo’s offered a true picture of homosexual life. I knew Matt was clueless, but I still wanted to believe he was right.

Matt and I developed a therapeutic relationship. During the year we spent together, he learned far more from me than I did from him. I tried to take his advice. I was sharing a house that year with another grad student who was in the process of coming out and experiencing his own disillusionment. Because I had been his only gay friend, and had encouraged him to come out, his bitterness came to be directed at me, and our relationship suffered for it. Meanwhile, I developed a close friendship with a member of the faculty who was openly gay. When I first informed Matt, he was ecstatic. He thought I was finally come out properly. The faculty member was just the sort of friend I needed. But the faculty member, as it turned out, despite his immaculate professional facade, was a deeply disturbed man who put all of his friends through emotional hell, which I of course shared with a shocked and silenced Matt. (I tried to date but, as usual, experienced the same pattern that characterized all my homosexual relationships. The friendship lasted as long as the sexual heat. Once that cooled, my partner’s interest in me as a person dissipated with it.) It was not a good year. At the end of it, I remember Matt staring at me, with glazed eyes and a shell-shocked look on his face, and admitting, “You know, being gay is a lot harder than I realized.”

Not everyone I spoke to over the years rejected what I had to say out of hand. I once corresponded with an English ex-Dominican. I was ecstatic to learn that he was gay, and was eventually kicked out of his order for refusing to remain in the closet. He included an e-mail address in one of his books, and I wrote him, wanting to know if his experience of life as a homosexual was significantly different from mine. I presumed it must be, since he had written a couple of books, passionately defending the right of homosexuals to a place in the Church. His response to me was one of the last nails in the coffin of my life as a gay man. To my astonishment, he admitted that his experiences were not unlike mine. All he could suggest was that I keep trying, and eventually everything would work out. In other words, this brilliant man, whose books had meant so much to me, had nothing to suggest except that I keep doing the same thing, while expecting a different result. There was only one reasonable conclusion. I would be nuts if I took his advice. It took me twenty years, but I finally reached the conclusion that I did not want to be insane.

So where am I now? I am attending a militantly orthodox parish in Houston that is one of God’s most spectacular gifts to me. My best friend Mark (not his real name) is, like me, a refugee from the homosexual insane asylum. He is also a devout believer, though a Presbyterian (no one is perfect). From Mark I have learned that two men can love each other profoundly while remaining clothed the entire time.

We are told that the Church opposes same-sex love. Not true. The Church opposes homogenital sex, which in my experience is not about love, but about obsession, addiction, and compensation for a compromised masculinity.

I am not proud of the life I have lived. In fact, I am profoundly ashamed of it. But if reading this prevents one naïve, gullible man from making the same mistakes, then perhaps with the assistance of Our Lady of Guadalupe; of St. Joseph, her chaste spouse; of my patron saint, Edmund Campion; of St. Josemaría Escrivá; of the blessed Carmelite martyrs of Compiégne; and, last but not least, of my special supernatural guide and mentor, the Venerable John Henry Newman, I can at least hope for a reprieve from some of the many centuries in Purgatory I have coming to me.

So, what do we as a Church and a culture need to do? Tear down the respectable façade and expose the pornography beneath. Start pressuring homosexuals to tell the truth about their lives. Stop debating the correct interpretation of Genesis 19. Leave the men of Sodom and Gomorrah buried in the brimstone where they belong. Sodom is hidden in plain view from us, here and now, today. Once, when preparing a lecture on Cardinal Newman, I summarized his classic Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine in this fashion: Truth ripens, error rots. The homosexual rights movement is rotten to the core. It has no future. There is no life in it. Sooner or later, those who are caught up in it are going to wake up from the dream of unbridled desire or else die. It is just a matter of time. The question is: how long? How many children are going to be sacrificed to this Moloch?

Until several months ago, there was a Lobo’s in Houston too. Not accidentally, I’m sure, its layout was identical to the one in Austin. It was just a few blocks from the gas station where I take my car for service. Recently, I was taking a walk through the neighborhood while my tires were being rotated. And I noticed something. There was a padlock on the door at Lobo’s. A sign on the door read, “The previous tenant was evicted for nonpayment of rent.” The books and the porn, the façade and what it conceals, are gone now. Praise God.

Ronald G. Lee is a librarian in Houston, Texas.

“© document.writeln(globalCopyrightNotice); 2006 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved. February 2006, Volume LXXIII, Number 2″.  “Reprinted with permission from NEW OXFORD REVIEW, www.newoxfordreview.org.”

 

 

To view title page (with graphic image of author-?-hit following link):

                     http://www.newoxfordreview.org/article.jsp?did=0206-lee

 

 

 

PART 2 (COUNTERPOINT)

 

 

PART 2:

 

Lee v. Lobo

A short impression/rebuttal of one homosexual’s

Diatribe against the hypocrisy of

The “gay” movement:

A COUNTERPOINT ESSAY  By: Robert R. Schoch

CONCERNING:

The Truth About the Homosexual Rights Movement

New Oxford Review (Feb.  8,  2006)

By Ronald G. Lee

 

To borrow a phrase from Ronald Lee’s homosexual-movement-bashing article, here is “how I deconstruct” Lee’s claimed “deconstruction” of Lobo’s (gay-oriented) bookstore in Austin, Texas.  I wish we were all in a roundhouse discussion forum because this is a vital matter to the entire homosexual community and the world—both secular and clerical–in which it must co-exist.

 

The writer here is, in my opinion, writing a disturbingly provocative, but equally sad, “cry for help”. He suffers from spiritually-crippling shame from being what he was born- homosexual, but he seems to argue that most of his misery results from the hypocrisy and/or outright sham inherent in the homosexual rights movement.

Lee criticizes the “falseness” of the Lobo’s Book Store, which he casts as effigy of the gay movement, for their having put Oscar Wilde on the front shelves to create a venire of respectability while drawing their revenues and raison d’etre from the gay porn traded in the back rooms.  Shame, shame. And shame. It appears as though Lee took a long and studied look at the prurient products lining Lobo’s rear-roomed shelves, leaving the reader to wonder whether the instigators of Lee’s investigations were academic, or. . . endemic.

 

Lee proffers this revelation – his “Lobo Deconstruction”–as though he was  blowing the lid off Western society’s repression of sexuality when in reality the civilized, authoritarian and institutional suppression of our sexual natures was annealed long before it was conventionally canonized in Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) over perhaps the most sexually-repressed among our cultural forbears and progenitors of our prurient propensities.

 

The gay subculture has no monopoly on sexual repression, and the hypocrisies it fosters. Hugh Hefner’s seminal American  hetero-porn (Playboy Magazine) touted and traded on its “intellectual” offerings,  e.g., “the Playboy Advisor”, and encouraged its readership to claim they bought the magazine for its “written” features, fashion consulting, movie reviews, “ribald” classic short stories, etc… ad nudeum. (Private confession: my favorite part was the Vargas drawing of women. They’re so much more charmingly drawn than photographed…even with the live ones aided by airbrush.)

 

Alluding to the “proper” (a.k.a. phony, cosmetic, “bait and switch”) placement of Oscar Wilde up front was the best example of Lee’s hoisting himself on his own petard, as it was this very brilliant and tortured English wit who suffered most egregiously from essentially the same sort of oppressive and hypocritically-theocratic intolerance Lee delivers in his diatribe against Lobo and the gay lib movement as a micro/macrocosmic whole.  Wilde spent years in Redding Jail for “seducing” (loving)  an English nobleman’s son. Now that was truly an obscenity, I’d say…and yet, that story and author’s products are placed by Lobo’s Book Store in the front of the store.

 

Before we pass on what’s truly “porn”, let’s linger a moment with Oscar Wilde, one of the most prolific and accomplished literary artists of our enlightened era. He once said, insightfully, “There is no such thing as obscene writing; there is only good literature and bad literature.”  

 

To Lee, I’d simply remark in re his opening volleys at Lobo’s front window… The book store obviously put its best gay-related literature up front and put the rest in the back room.  Every day great newspapers circulate millions of pages of printed materials, but there is no way they can determine which of their subscribers bypass the op/ed page for the sports section, or the crossword puzzle, or the funny papers and other pulp product.   I’d simply suggest: put the smorgasborg  on the table and let the consumer choose his dish. How can you improve on freedom of choice? One man’s manifesto is another man’s porn. It will always be this way.

 

But let’s probe beneath Lee’s metaphor to his malady. My impression of Lee’s lament across his sad essay’s board is that he is simply miserable because he can’t personally find a steadfast lover to share his homosexual self. In the expression of his discontent, his forest is obfuscated by his many unfellable trees. He has so many blinding spots in his analytic peripheral vision.

 

Lee’s thesis is that the homosexual (gay) “movement” is fake. It’s fake, he suggests, because its leaders and their  shallow media reporters lead the world to believe that gay men predominantly seek and gay men commonly achieve “monogamous” relationships with other men. He offers no statistics which either gainsay this or compare the relative successes of heterosexuals and homosexuals in their seekings and achievings of monogamous (sexually exclusive) relational bondings.

 

He argues from the personally specific to the demonized general. He cites his own experience, personal and observed failures, where homosexuals seem  invariably to cheat on their partners sexually. He points to the fact that at gay bars, spas, etc., gay  men always have and perhaps always will partake in serial sex with. . . multiple partners.

 

Well, that’s what men are prone (genetically engineered) to do.  Where’s the shame?  There is nothing to  prevent two men of disparate tendencies and desires from becoming exceptions to the (claimed) predominating rule of homosexual behavior. That’s what “civilization” is about… acting contrarily to our “natural” inclinations. We don’t eat each other…any more. (No gay innuendo intended, as that particular entre’ is an equal-opportunity item on the gay/straight menu. We don’t copulate with…every opportunity presenting itself…any more, although there are thousands of fellow species out there who quite naturally still do.

 

I personally know of no heterosexual  marriage that endured for multiple decades wherein one of the partners didn’t “cheat” sexually on the other. The Bible (pardon me, but Lee cited that “authority” first) says in part that it’s just as wicked to sin in the heart as the flesh, and I’d risk hell in a Halliburton hand basket wagering no man has ever viewed (inadvertently or with puerility aforethought) one of Hefner’s centerfolds without sinning in his silly male heart.

 

I think Lee’s entire thesis is off course because of his personal frustration in not having found a male partner who will be sexually faithful to him.  He doesn’t know whom to punish for this personal state of affairs, so he projects the face of hypocrisy on the entire gay-liberation movement in which serial sexuality is overtly rampant. But should we term it “infidelity” as we do within the institution of heterosexual wedlock? Could or even should the same mores ever be co-mingled in cross-comparisons of relationships through which the species survives and relationships that exist solely to meet the personal, societal and sexual needs of those involved?

 

The gay movement was not begun to extol the virtues or export the gay lifestyle to the heterosexual world. The gay movement was begun as an project of affirmative action… to champion the rights of gay people to be gay, and being gay, to be free from the condemnation and loathing of their fellow (straight) communities.

 

Gays have been murdered by insecure and fanatically- fundamentalist “straights” simply for being gay. Now there’s some true obscenity.  There too is your only needed reason d’etre for a gay rights movement.  But there’s more:

 

Much more. By far the worst oppressions suffered by  innate (i.e. all) homosexuals are at the hands of their clerical brethren and their fundamentalist followers. The fundamentalists among Jewish, Christian and Muslims around the world condemn practicing homosexuals to their respective versions of Purgatory and hellish damnation. Very often (even today) fundamentalists murder homosexuals, some in the name of their god, or at least in accord with the alleged words and commandments of their god.  When the judgments and condemnations come to the Christian homosexual  from the pulpits of their own faiths, the damage to self-esteem, soul and spirit is often catastrophic…  almost as catastrophic as the theologically-imposed “remedies” prescribed by these clerical authorities.

 

Within the fundamental, “neo-conservative” Evangelical Christian community, homosexuality is viewed (and condemned) as a sin against the body of the Church. Those who fail to repent and become…”healed” of this perceived aberration  (through either celibacy or practicing unnatural heterosexuality) must miss out on salvation, the Rapture, and face the fate and eternal travails of Purgatory and Hell. This judgmental and condemnatory view of homosexuality is the prime element in the morally-driving force leading gay men and women into the institutional closets of the Priesthood and Catholic Sisterhood.

 

No one notices or counsels the Catholic aspirant for ordination to follow Abraham’s mandate to go forth, marry and multiply;  and,  novice Mary’s homosexual spinsterhood goes benevolently unquestioned in the nunnery wherein she can finally adore openly but never passionately embrace the sisterly objects of her natural affection.  The stealthy dormitory sequestrations and separations  are accomplished intuitively and rotely in the time-tutored tradition of Mother Superior’s expertly-trained oversight. The names and confessions of homosexually-repressed and liberated members of both repressive Catholic orders are now, in these days of homosexual and clerical “outings”  filling volumes on the library shelves, and not simply dockets on the criminal courthouse doors.

 

The hypocrisy of Lee’s judgment (relegation of all homosexuals to Purgatory and damnation as sinners) is exceeded only by its irony: His very diatribe against this defensive movement on part of homosexuals is in part and parcel the cause of the movement he decries. A convincing case can be made for the contention that without the institution and imposition of primarily-fundamentalist Christian, Judaic and Islamic taboos, proscriptions and sanctions of homosexual behavior, there would be no gay rights movement.

 

 It is clearly the fundamental mores and taboos that mandate the homosexual’s revealing (confessing) his sexual orientation (“coming out of the closet”) that drives homosexuals guilt- and shame-ridden into the killing confines of their closets.  It is clearly the unforgiving, intolerant clerical condemnation of the homosexual that foments the brutal gay-bashings and murders, such as the one depicted in the recently-acclaimed Brokeback Mountain cinematic saga, a 2005 movie based on the 1997 magazine short-story portrayed in Wyoming, which was coincidentally followed by a homosexual murder in the same area the following year.

 

Had it not been for the fundamentalist, Catholic/Christian-based condemnation of homosexuality the Brokeback Mountain story illustrates, the two men featured in the story might have been happily mated for a lifetime.  Their “token” wives and real children might have been spared the complex and catastrophically-cascading consequences of homosexual love crammed by clerical consensus and cruel condemnation into the hypocritical closets of our repressive Judeo-Christian culture. This was all but an isolated instance in our fundamental Christian dominated culture.

 

Recent studies aired and authorities cited on Oprah Winfrey’s show in January 2006 indicate that in excess of three million homosexual men are “closeted” in conventional marriages in the same way Ennis and Jack were in the heartbreaking tale of Brokeback Mountain. “Brokeback Mountain marriages”, then represent the tragic composition of about one marriage in 10 to 30 in our homosexually-tabooed culture.  According to Kinsey and more-recent sexual researchers, one in 8 to 12 humans is homosexual. Do your own math in extrapolating  the probable number of homosexuals who are husbands and fathers within “legitimate” but heterosexually-unilateral unions. But when your calculations become multiple 7 figures, don’t fret: Our Christian Community counselors assure us the affliction and aberration of homosexuality, within and without the matrimonial union, can be “prayed away”. 

 

If  a tortoise were to pray to God  to become a hare, I think God would listen. Then I think God might bless both the tortoise and the hare and conceivably say:

 

“I hear all your prayers and your yearnings to win,

But you seek to prevail through a changing of skin-

Go now  tortoise with tortoises and hare run with hares-

Your victories will find you in spite of your prayers.”

 

I personally grew up knowing that three of my closest friends were “in the closet” gay males. They have all been married and divorced with horrendously painful (for everyone) consequences such as portrayed in the award-winning movie (BBM), the movie everyone in the civilized world should see. And see again. Luckily no-one’s father-in-law killed any of my friends when the truth of his sexuality was finally revealed. The sad thing is that, in  most cases, gay men wait until their children are college age or older before revealing the truth of their sexuality to their families and the rest of the generally unforgiving world. 

 

More ironic still is the obvious fact that the priesthood and sisterhood of the Catholic Church provide the largest conventional closets of all for homosexually-born men and women. Robert Pirsig, in his “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” teaches that when civilized men collectively err in judgment, it is more common for their misjudgments to be 180 degrees off the truth line than, say 5 or 15 degrees. Such is clearly the case with the professed motives of men and women who enter the Catholic Clergy and other fundamentalist faiths where celibacy is mandated. 

 

When I was young, I used to think to myself when I learned of someone’s entering either this celibacy-bound seminary or that immaculate sisterly order, “Wow! Look at what they’re giving up for the Lord.”   One-Hundred and Eighty degrees of naivete’ I’d now, quite repentantly, maintain.

 

Today I’d say: “Looks like one of probably two things is going on here: There’s either a gay guy or gal entering the most convenient and confining closets on earth to hide his true nature from the outside world…or a gay guy or gal who’s ensconcing him or herself where she or he was truly born and bred…right there in the fundamentalist briar patch….with an endless supply of religious rabbits, just like themselves.  Or maybe with Einstein’s trumping wisdom, I’d opine (with the same swipe he ended the dispute over whether light was a particle or wave)… it’s probably both.

 

Say you I should be branded and banished from any church I’ve even taken communion in for such blasphemy? Sure;  OK, I’ll take that punishment after you run at least 75,000 pederasts and four times that number of homosexuals out of the priesthood and the nunneries of the world’s Christian Community closets where your dogmatic censorship of their shameful natures impels them to seek and hide within the only sane sanctuary left for the homosexual followers of Jesus Christ.

 

Once ironically and hypocritically-clad and ensconced in the Catholic costumes, monasteries, shrines, pulpits and confessionals, what do these repressed homosexuals do besides pray and lapse, lapse and molest, molest and deny, deny and be indicted, be indicted and excommunicated (finally!)?  What they do is form de-facto 12-step programs and institutions in the form of promulgating and chanting the  dogma of sin and repentance. They naively and self-hypnotically characterize their own homosexual natures as “sinful disorders of character” born of being somehow “wounded” by either abuse or homosexual “conversion” (as in “seduction”) ,  or general homosexual “contagion”. Homosexuality is characterized as the work product of “the devil”, that conveniently invisible entity whose alleged ritualistic exorcism will vanish and take away with him as he vaporizes his victim’s homosexuality…  As though homosexuality is other than an in-born and immutable state of sexual nature. It’s insidious. It’s false. It’s malignant. Often, much too often, it’s fatal. Invariably, in spiritual terms, it’s tragic.

 

Adding insult to injury, take the worst exemplar of Catholic homosexual hypocrisy in earth’s history…the one which likely caused 100 million more deaths than the  maniacal father-in-law in Brokeback Mountain, Wyoming. That many millions were in fact killed and a sizeable portion by way of Christian/Catholic-condoned aggression and anti-Semite genocide.

 

Here comes my central thesis—the subject title of which—“Mean Queens”–will  entitle a book I am in the process of  writing.  Fundamentalist suppression, ostracizing, excommunications and condemnations of homosexuals not only drives them into institutional closets (such as the Catholic nunneries, priesthood and conventional marriages, e.g. BBM marriages)…it drives them into a far deeper, far darker closet wherein the closeted captivity transmogrifies the homosexual into a monster.  

 

The “mean queen” is the homosexual so deeply repressed by the constrictive civilized forces around him that he climbs, wholly and obliviously into the closet of his own mind and spirit.  These are the Hitlers, the  Jeff Dahlmers, Charlie Mansons  and the Ted Bundy’s of the world’s very long list of completely-psychotic, narcissistically-psychopathic, in-the-self-closeted mean queens of the sociopathic world.  

 

Napoleon was probably one. We’ve all known mean queens… the bold and the beautiful actresses and actors of our own and recent eras.  The long list of historically-significant mean queens include the greatest overtly heterosexual, covertly homosexual lovers in history.  Sir Lawrence Olivier considered his own homosexuality to be “partial”, or even errantly “voluntary”.   This mean queen literally drove the women in his life insane. Rudolph Valentino, ditto. Rock Hudson made love to every woman he starred with…but seldom if ever managed to  muster more than a single carnal curtain call. 

 

Remember the opportunistic beating poor Ennis in Brokeback dealt the unfortunate truck driver who yelled at him?  Ennis at that point thought that it was his lover Jack’s charm which alone on earth, apart from any innate predisposition to be “queer”, made (i.e., seduced)  him to fall in carnal love with a cowboy.  Ennis was, when deprived of his beloved Jack, a substantially mean queen.  But let’s get back to Adolph…the Christian insult that, via his  Catholicism’s launching, became the  greatest injury the world has yet suffered at the hands of humanity’s perhaps meanest queen. 

 

And, regardless of what you may say or think—and I’m addressing you mean queens (i.e., you queens closeted to yourself…and so, if I’ve made you mad by now and you don’t think you’re gay, better think again) out there especially—I refuse to do your research for you. I’m going to—quite briefly—outline to you hereinafter the historic truth. You can Google and turn library pages yourself if you doubt my spin or suspect a  “revision” on my part of “true” history.

 

Here’s some of it: Catholicism incorporates Judaism in its Bible, creed, ethics and dogma. That includes the Old Testament accounts of Eden, Abraham and Moses. Abraham was allegedly deemed the father/progenitor of his God’s “chosen” people: Moses, for the purpose of taking control of the land promised by the same God to those chosen people killed entire ethnic tribes (including every man, woman, child, ass and chicken) in order to take possession of this designated real estate in the Middle East of today’s world.

 

This was genocide by anyone’s or any culture’s definition of the term. The Jewish, Christian (especially Catholic) “authorities” all endorse this ethnic cleansing as having been morally “right” and “justified” because it was commanded by their shared “God”. The commands were written, and as written in “the Bible”.

 

Consonant with the history and dogma of this same Bible, Adolph Hitler characterized himself a Christian and the rest of the enlightened world has since characterized (with compelling documentation) this same Hitler as a closeted homosexual.  He had two token female-linked relationships in his relatively long life and both were abusive. He was very clearly, and quite malignantly, a mean queen.

 

Because of the Christian dogma of his time, his formula for  the master-race (Herrenvolk) he would ensconce as sole masters of humanity required not just “Arianism” but heterosexual Arianism. This was of course because, to accord with Adam’s mandate and  Abraham’s manifesto from “God” , these Arians had to be both able and willing to “go forth and multiply” according to Old Testament ethic and edict.

 

Before he could accomplish the global ethnic cleansing to make all this possible,  he had to acquire the power. Having published his agenda for the Herrenvolk in Mein Kamph, he proceeded to vie in Germany for the power and authority to accomplish his agenda, and the door to that dream of world domination was the Reich chancellorship. Having full awareness of Hitler’s agenda of primarily anti-Semitic ethnic cleansing, the Catholic Church proceeded to engineer the former (Catholic) Chancellor’s stepping aside  and the supplying of  Adolph Hitler with the votes sufficient to fulfill his genocidal program.   In so doing, the Catholic Church installed as head of the Third Reich the world’s most efficient ethnic serial killer, and the world’s meanest queen (homosexual). His warring craft and conquering charisma seemingly had no rival in the course of human history, unless of course you include Abraham and Moses, and maybe Joshua. Bush came later and is, of course, in a class by himself wherein  both his fascistic prowess and Christian hypocrisy are yet to be determined. 

 

The fact that Hitler’s agenda of genetic cleansing included the eradication and even the internment of all homosexuals, it’s the descriptive norm, again, rather than the prescriptive norm of sociological machinations that counts… what was really happening instead of what the party in power said was happening. 

 

Being himself a homosexual, Hitler had to perform within his parameters and powers as Fuhrer  of the Herrenvolk… “in the closet” so to speak. It is not known whether Hitler “came out” and covertly indulged in homosexual acts. Everyone in his administration (out of fear) observed Adolph to surround himself with aids and personal administrative assistants who were apparently, reputedly, and often openly gay. Those whose “gayness” was publicly detected and published were sent to concentration camps…according to the prescriptive norms of national ethnic purification. But there  was one thing different about the concentration camp to which gays were inevitably dispatched (unless they also happened to be Jewish homosexuals, in which case they were mainstreamed to the camps with gas-powered shower stalls):  the internment camp in question somehow never became a “death camp”, but in fact and function remained merely a place of benevolent
”concentration”. 

 

This salutary sentencing of Nazi homosexuals was historically Hitler’s “excommunication” sanction. Reminiscent of what Vatican officials in past decades have done with their burgeoning roster of priestly pederasts— Hitler’s homosexual misfits were, after their homosexual “outings”, simply passed on to more remote, benign and anonymous quarters. Sending more B’re Rabbits to more Briar Patches. Burying the mean queens in smaller castles as it were, with lower parapets…and political profiles. 

 

The Catholic Church is still up to the same old tricks today. But why?  For the simple and clean-as-Occam’s razor answer, just look up(wards).   Not as far up as Heaven, maybe, but just high up as …Brokeback Mountain.  Where did the two gay co-protagonists go to hide in that future cinema classic?

 

Into holy Christian wedlock, of course. What better  cover for a homosexual could  exist?  When you put a gay man in a heterosexual marriage, and he has a wife and children, does that change anything?  Of course, no.    But what keeps them there is what is so sinister and insidiously dangerous.  Malignant. It’s the same thing that happens when a gay man enters the priesthood.  Christian wedlock and the priesthood accomplish the same thing. They create not just a convenient Christian hideout, but also a sort of conventional 12-step institution wherein priests and gay husbands can keep themselves “straight” by having each day to preach and perform a phony sermon and serial acts of heterosexual manhood. 

 

The phony sermon preached often enough becomes…somehow  more credible, to both pulpit and congregation. And for the therapist behind the pulpit, therapeutic.   If this proposition is  starting to sound like what Hitler’s Big Lie (the Herrenvolk, Arian, Master-race lie) was prescribed to do, then your discerning cerebral dendrites are doing their duty. 

 

The common thread in this Hitler/Catholic commentary?…The common thread is hypocrisy. The common thread is that this hypocrisy is as old as history and will, as history, continue to repeat itself over and over again until the lesson is learned. 

 

The lesson is not simply that the Catholic Church and its ally, the Third Reight of Germany, were/are empowered/administered at least substantially by the dysfunctional machinations of suppressed, “mean-queen” homosexuality. The lesson is that placing the matter of homosexuality’s morality or “sinfulness” in the hands of the Catholic Clergy or the fundamentalist clergy of any faith, is like putting a Christian serial killer named Adolph Hitler (as the Catholic church actually did 60-some years back) at the head of the strongest  military power in Europe. It’s having the fox on guard at a Christian House of Chickens.

 

Reformed smokers are the most “righteous” and vehement advocates of nicotine abstinence…Why? Because they are constantly aware that they  still want to smoke. Not a great analogy, because smoking’s an addiction (rather than an innate need) and is actually bad for humans. But it’ll serve: Like a reformed smoker, the repressed (mean queen) gay priest, or papal official, along with the heterosexually-married (mean-queen) will preach the most inspired, fire-and-brimstone diatribes against the homosexual lifestyle, not because Jesus or his Father in Heaven in any way ever condemned—or even took time to mention it—but because in preaching the sermon, the hypocriticial priest is repressing/surpressing his own innate, persisting and perennial urge to partake in the style of life he is condemning as sin.

 

 After hearing the sermons, one married or celibate homosexual member of the congregation will be inspired to preach a sermon of “repentance” or celibacy to his homosexual friend, and condemn him to hell if he doesn’t heed the message. How misery does love company…and sometimes, looking back  Brokeback Moountain way, occasionally loves its happier homosexual company to death.

 

Hitler sent his homosexual colleagues and comrades to stations of benign isolation. Today’s Catholic ministers, among many of whom are the meanest queens alive today, are damning gentle, loving and would-be monogamous homosexual souls to eternal hell. Taking devout Christians aboard the Peace-through-Christ train, and then telling them their innate and immutable sexual propensities are tickets to eternal damnation is a hell of a way to run a Christian railroad.

 

The Catholic condemnation, excommunication and damning to hell of their homosexual congregation or homosexuals outside the Faith is little different in kind or effect from Moses’ form of ethnic cleansing or Adolph Hitler’s.  And the victims of this hypocritical genetic cleansing are not just the homosexuals. The homosexual who is condemned by his Church until he relents , “repents” and retreats to the institutions of marriage or monasteries, wounds not only himself in the process but his nominal (but unnatural) spouse. And don’t forget the children: What do you suppose it’s like to be a 16-year old and watch your father exit his closet and run away with the plumber’s assistant?  Is anyone reminded of Simon’s plaintive lyrics on the subject of the closet in the Robinson home (movie: The Graduate)?

 

Hide it in a hiding place
Where no one ever goes.
Put it in your pantry with your cupcakes.
It’s a little secret,
Just the Robinsons’ affair.
Most of all, you’ve got to hide it
from the kids.

 

 Whenever the homosexual repents and seeks instead of marriage the shelter of the priesthood, then we can pick up any daily newspaper in the world and read the names of the latest victims of Catholic homosexual condemnation and repression. Shame. Shame.

 

And shame.

 

 Mr. Lee, you need look no further. The gay rights movement protects and even champions, as I do,  my gay friends’ right to…to be and to live as they were intelligently designed.  I personally go much further and insist they be permitted to live in love and in dignity. My indignation on their behalves incidentally, provides impetus for the present writing.

 

Lee and fundamentalist Catholics like him are anathema in their own monolithically-fundamentalist movement (the Christian gay-rights bashing movement) , because it’s evident they consider their own admitted gayness a sin in the eyes of their own God. I’m not going to take the time here to cite the portions of Lee’s piece that make it clear that he naively and masochistically anticipates spending an eternity in hell (or is it rather a finite period in Purgatory?) for leading his gay life. It’s too silly—and at the same time sad–a proposition to oppose.

 

But, since he apparently subscribes to that degrading religious dogma (that there is a Creator God out there who’s going to roast him in eternal hell for performing the sexual role he was “intelligently-designed” to play), I can rationally say that nothing else he says can have much significance.  Why debate the point of the existence or non-existence of gay monogamy when in the final analysis, all who are gay are damned, be they monogamous or sexually… lapin?

 

Being gay is not good. Being gay is not bad. Being gay is simply being gay. Same with being heterosexual: per se, neither good nor bad. It’s what you do with and because of your sexual propensities that culminates in good or bad. Are people hurt by your conduct?  If so, there’s cause for guilt and …change. If not…well, like dying 80-year old Maude says to 16-year-old Harold about his declared love for her: “That’s wonderful, Harold….Go and love  some more.”

 

Breaking the chain of this stream of considerations of Lee’s gay self-consciousness and flagellations, I have to say that, apart from being sad for his sadness, apparent loneliness (and shame), I learned something I’d never heard before: There are young men in gay bars that the frequenters thereof call “bug chasers”. These young men turn out to be lost little homosexual souls who seek an early demise through AIDS as an alternative preferable to growing old. It was, I gather,  Lee’s way of pointing out the “shallowness” of gay sexuality…i.e. that, as a culture, they are so superficially “into” being buff, young and beautiful…that there is no place for a horny, needful beer-gutted middle-ager in their whole community… at least in the up-scale “gay”-gathering venues.  So sad. So very, very sad. One could argue that at least part of the cause for the young homosexual’s suicidal anticipations might include the rejections. Condemnations, and excommunications he suffers throughout his life from his pious brothers in the church for acting in accordance with the natures God gave him.

 

Sad- (this fixation on physical youth and beauty) yes, but certainly not unique–as Lee clearly implies–to the “gay community”.  I don’t know which big-breasted blond Hollywood babe coined the quip that spoke its trendy truth to all the heterosexual narcissists of her day… “All I want to do is live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse.”  I’ve got plenty of hedonistic hetero-sexual friends who, as they are gaining wrinkles and losing their tee-shots and comeliness in t-shirts, are smoking and drinking themselves into early graves. I think from now on I’ll call them “Bud Chasers”.

 

Gays didn’t invent promiscuity. Gay’s didn’t invent divorce on the grounds of sexual infidelity. For Christ’s sake (allegedly only, mind you) they’re not even allowed to get married in most states, and never will if the Neo-Con phony Christian Bushites stay in control of Capitol Hill and our Supremes.

 

I now think I have reacted sufficiently to this pathetic display of sexual discontent and  dissonance.   While Lee believes his sexual nature is damned by his God, he has assigned himself to his own artificial (sinthesized)  hell. So long as  he  voluntarily pines in Purgatory, he’ll continue to need to assign the blame for his suffering to some cause beyond his control.  So he’s chosen this myth of “gay hypocrisy”.  He’s a pot shouting at a kettle for its communal blackness within the theocratic cauldron of neo-conservative Christian consensus and communion. 

 

He admits not understanding what his friend meant when he accused Lee of not really having come out of the closet. Lee has emerged only partially from the closet he entered early in life. He was born gay, but as a child crawled into the closet for…all the regular (socially-compelling, politically and theolocratically-correct)  reasons. As an adult,  he stepped only partially and tentatively out, treading tenderly barefoot and untutored, and always entirely against every contusing, dogmatically-splintering grain,  down the dark and daunting halls of his fundamentalist Catholic commune.    He admits he’s attracted to guys, but purports to be in effect, “monogamy” in search of “monogamy” in a culture (gay community) of  hedonistic  cheaters. 

 

Again, he’s hoisted on his own petard. He is not monogamous until he succeeds in living a monogamous life. He puts down the “gay culture” but apparently resorts to their common venues for consortium (such as the internet and the Church—the very theocratic authority that dogmatically provides him  his required curriculum in essential self-loathing). I personally know a gay couple who have been homosexually partnered up as long as I’ve been legally married…i.e. over 30 years. So I know the oxymoronic  institution (gay monogamy) exists. Whether my friends Steve and Neill cheat on one another in the bars–or  simply in their born-again Christian hearts–is their business, and nobody else’s…just as I consider my own sex life—actual and fantasized.

 

I say hurray for Barnes and Nobles; Hurray for Lobo’s book store. Hurray for porno and sex toys.   Hurray for any book, any picture, any …thing…. that brings a human animal pleasure in this world without causing another animal, human or otherwise (even the forbear of a leather wallet). . . pain. Especially the pain of exclusion… including excommunication.  (And by the final way, Mr. Lee, gays certainly have no corner on fetishes. Wanna see my feathered……oh, well, never mind.)

 

What Lee needs to face up to is the compelling likelihood that, with both homo- and hetero-sexuality, sex always was and always will be about desire for and seeking pleasure, and love will always be about a sharing and symbiosis of spirit. As for gay bars and gay lifestyle being more “errant” or serially non-monogamous, so what?  If heterosexual men could walk into a bar confident that within 15 minutes they will find a sexual partner for the evening (with something other than an expensive pro), I’ll dare say Christian monogamy would be in far greater jeopardy than it is today.

 

Men (males, not mankind) are capable of experiencing and forming a sexual urge and intent in a single N.Y. millisecond. This ability carries over from heterosexuality to homosexuality, unfortunately, and with the latter, there is simply no natural impediment to  two potential partners  saying yes…immediately…and as frequently as men are naturally disposed. If this were not the case, the so-called “she-males” (humans with male genitalia and female dress, appearance and behavior) in Indonesia would not be gaining and overtaking the marketing ground of female prostitutes and “contract marriage partners”.  With a she-male, says one of today’s most successful on-line marketers in this modern arena of evolved “sexploitation”, how can a man resist a woman who looks like Raquel Welch and “wants it” just as much…and just as often…as the man?  A natural woman is no competition. Can’t hold a candle, or so they say.

 

I have considerable compassion for Lee’s suffering, but I think it is unwise, and unkind at the same time, for him  publicly to proclaim that he, as a gay human,  and our Christian and extended communities at large, are the victims of a hoax in regard to the disparity between the descriptive and prescriptive norms comprising the Gay Rights and Liberation movements and agendas. Lobo’s places its more adult (albeit gay-oriented) offerings in the back of the store in the same way, and for the same reasons family video stores shelve their “X-rated” heterosexual videos and DVD’s in the room at the rear with the caveat: “For adults, 18 years and older only.”

 

If Lee were happily cohabiting with the man of his homosexual dreams, would he have penned this inordinately erudite and comprehensive diatribe against the gay rights movement and its leaders? I hope he hasn’t given up either his hope  or search for true love within the framework of his innately-unique human  constitution and biology.  I can only sympathize and commiserate with him over his sad decision to cast the blame for his unrequited search for a monogamous soul mate and sexual partner on his own gay community, and its collective desire to be permitted, within its shared civilized order, to survive, and thrive, as we are, with unrestrained liberty, tolerance and dignity.

 

In closing, a small parable and a humble suggestion… for the sake of tolerance and understanding among men. To those of you who have considered my words, and those of Lee, and notwithstanding those considerations, reflections and independent ancillary studies still believe that homosexuality is a sinful thing which  may and should be “prayed away”, please hear me patiently to inform you as follows: I’m a true believer in the fact that faith can move mountains. I just don’t believe it can move Brokeback Mountain. I just don’t believe there’s any reason to believe it can or that it should. In this regard, I invite the Christian/Catholic community to follow the ancient parable and  paradigm of Mohammed and the Mountain. If  Brokeback mountain will not come to the Catholic fundamentalist, let the Catholic fundamentalist go to Brokeback Mountain.

 

War is our only enemy.

 

 

Robert R. (Dusty) Schoch: March 7, 2006

 

Robert (“Dusty”) Schoch is an attorney, novelist and screenplay writer, living in High Point, N.C.  Other of his political/social essays may be found in the foreign-policy sections of the website of which he is co-editor, Democrats.write.com

 

FOOTNOTE AND ADDENDA:

After completing the first draft of  this essay, I rejoiced to read the essay of Leonard Pitts (Miami Herald’s Pulitzer prize columnist) on a similar subject, this week (Feb. 27).  Please seek out and  find this piece athttp://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/columnists/leonard_pitts/13970655.htm  or elsewhere with Google under the key words: “Leonard Pitts archives”. The title to this wonderful piece is “Fire, Brimstone The Surest Way to Say You’re Gay”,  and it has to do with Fred  Phelps, that pastor who with his followers showed up at the funeral of Matthew Shepard, the gay college student who was beaten to death in Wyoming 8 years back with signs saying “God Hates Fags”, and has since been showing up at funerals of soldiers who have died in Iraq preaching that they were killed by God as punishment for fighting for a country that condones homosexuality. (Incidentally, the original short story that inspired Brokeback Mountain was an account of this same Wyoming homicide.)  Has the world gone nuts? Or are we being beset mainly by a stampeding herd of very mean queens?  Pitts argues (as I argued about Ronald Lee’s and the Catholic condemnation of homosexuality in general) that Phelps’ fanaticism stems from repressed (closeted) homosexuality.  Beware of the mean queens in our midst, because what’s hidden in our closets can truly not only haunt, but hurt us.  Let’s never forget that, with a 99.9 percent of confidence,  we students of preventative history  realize that Adolph Hitler was a very mean queen. Who knows how many lives might have been spared if this petulant little paper hanger had been permitted to sashay outside his Aryan closet, paint his mediocre pictures and make love in lieu of war with his brave young soldiers?

 

We hope the preceding exchange serves to encourage and/or provoke more head-buttings of the same nature on further and future issues and essays.  It is the sincere  consensus of all of us who contribute to Democratswrite.com that our country is in a dire state both domestically and abroad.  We need some new cooks in our cognitive kitchens.  Those cooks will have to know that to make a better omelet we will have to crack some eggs.  So let’s keep cracking…

 

CONTACT AND COMMENT: We are in the process of building an on-site link for the submission of outside comment and submissions. In the interim, please communicate your wishes to post a reaction to the present article (debate) with our writer and foreign policy editor,  Robert R. (Dusty) Schoch, care of the “contact” link on this website. 

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