Month: January 2012

114. ignorance

‘They are Man’s,’ said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ‘And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it.’ cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. ‘Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end.’
— Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave 3: The Second of the Three Spirits

Full disclosure: I am angry right now.

If you follow GLBT news at all, one of the big items in Minnesota is the announcement on Tuesday[1] that the Anoka-Hennepin school board is considering an alternative to the Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy[2] that’s in place right now. This is the home district of Michele Bachmann, the anti-gay congresswoman whose husband Marcus(ss) runs the [Pray-Away-the-Gay] counselling clinic[3].

In case you aren’t familiar, the current policy prohibits teachers and administrators from talking about or interfering in matters concerning a student’s sexual orientation—including a student being bullied—the purpose being (and I’m speculating here) to protect school officials from being sued over insinuating that a teen is gay. What it’s created, however, is a culture in which GLBT teens have little recourse from bullies, and a culture in which nine students have committed suicide in the past two years, some of whom were gay or merely perceived to be gay.

Again, this is the home district of Michele Bachmann. And, not surprisingly, the Parent’s Action League, an ultra-conservative group, is protesting the new policy[4], stating that it is “being used as a pretext to advance a much broader agenda: the legitimization of homosexuality and related conduct to impressionable schoolchildren [and] will undermine the academic focus of this district and open the door to pro-homosexual and related conduct materials in the school curriculum thereby exposing students to concepts hostile to their religious faith and or moral convictions.”

So, “school safety” = “pro-homosexual.” Simply astounding.

MinnPost reported in an article on Thursday[5] that these parents also requested that, should this new policy be instituted, students also have access to information about conversion (i.e., “ex-gay”) therapy, a form of psychological terrorism that has been denounced and derided by every reputable therapist. They also demand that (and I’m not making this up) officials “provide the history of gay-related immune deficiency (GRID), AIDS, and the medical consequences of homosexual acts” and “provide pro-family, ex-homosexual and ex-transgender videos to secondary media centers.”

GRID, in case you don’t know, was the name initially proposed for the disease that became AIDS. In 1982.[6] It was promptly discarded for its inaccuracy[7]. Yet here it is again, in 2012, being referred to in a proposal by a bunch of right-wing, religious, anti-gay parents.

In Michele Bachmann territory.

This comes in the same month that the Tennessee General Assembly is meeting about the HB229 (a.k.a., “Don’t Say Gay”) bill[8] that’d make it illegal to even mention homosexuality in a public school, even though another 14-year-old committed suicide[9] this past week after he was relentlessly bullied at his school for being openly gay.

And we need to prohibit teachers from talking about homosexuality, as if that will stop kids from turning queer.

Just like we need to keep telling teens not to have sex before marriage, which is obviously going to stop teen girls from getting pregnant—just like it’s stopping them in Texas, which has the third highest teen birth rate[10], and the highest repeat teen birth rate[11], in the country. That’s one race you don’t want to come first in.

I am angry that there are still anti-sodomy laws[12] in Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Montana, which means the police can technically arrest you in your own home for having “gay sex.”

I am angry that Oklahoma State Rep. Mike Reynolds is attempting to push new DADT legislation[13] that would ban GLBT citizens from openly serving in the National Guard (even though a similar measure was attempted in Virginia last year, and the federal government responded by threatening to cut their entire budget)[14], a measure that Rick Perry lent his support to by encouraging Christian Oklahomans to mobilize.

I am angry that a 16-year-old atheist student [15] in Rhode Island received violence and death threats after she sued her school to have an overtly Christian banner taken down. (This is supremely ironic, considering that Rhode Island was founded by Roger Williams in 1636 as a haven for religious freedom.)[16]

I am angry that an Oklahoma Republican, State Sen. Ralph Shortey, is actually pushing a bill that would (according to the website Talking Points Memo):

outlaw the use of human fetuses in food, because, as he says, “there is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors.”[17]

Yes. Soylent Green is a tasty food additive made from dead babies.

I am angry that Rick Santorum (among other things) is publicly saying that he thinks that women who become pregnant after being raped should “make the best of a bad situation” and carry the fetus to term as a “broken gift from god.”[18] (This coming from a privileged white guy who will never have to face that scenario himself.)

I am furious that Tennessee Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) said that it’s “virtually impossible to contract AIDS through heterosexual sex.”[19] Tell that to the 12 million women living with AIDS in 2009 in Sub-Saharan Africa, compared with 8.2 million men. (More on women living with AIDS globally at http://www.avert.org/women-hiv-aids.htm.) Tell that to the children—born of heterosexual parents, mind you—who were infected at birth.

I am furious that the Catholic Church still advises against condom use[20], in places like Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas where it could save millions of lives, under the notion that condom use will encourage fornication and prevent procreation.

I’m fucking angry.

That is all.

References:

  1. Baca, Maria. “4 of 6 on Anoka school board back new policy on sexual orientation.” StarTribune. 24 Jan 2012.
  2. Anoka-Hennepin School District. “Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy.” 9 Feb 2009.
  3. Benjamin, Mark. “The Truth Behind Marcus Bachmann’s Controversial Christian Therapy Clinic.” Time Magazine, 15 Jul 2011.
  4. Lindquist, Bryan, and Michael Skaalerud. “Concerns & Demands.” Parents Action League, 09 Jan 2012.
  5. Hawkins, Beth. “Learning Curve.” MinnPost, 26 Jan 2012.
  6. Altman, Lawrence. “New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials.” The New York Times, 11 May 1982.
  7. Altman, Lawrence. “Outlook on AIDS is Termed Bleak.” The New York Times, 13 Jun 1988.
  8. Towle, Andy. “Tennessee’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill is Back for Another Try.” http://www.towleroad.com, 17 Jan 2012.
  9. Huffington Gay Voices. “Phillip Parker, Gay Tennessee Teen, Commits Suicide After Enduring Bullying.” Huffington Post, 23 Jan 2012.
  10. “50-State and National Comparisons.” The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, Nov 2011.
  11. “Lowering the Teen Birth Rate in Texas.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 30 Jun 2011.
  12.  Murphy, Kevin. “Gay groups angry Kansas anti-sodomy law remains on books.” Reuters, 24 Jan 2012.
  13. Wright, John. “Oklahoma lawmaker seeks to ban gays from serving openly in state’s National Guard.” DallasVoice, 10 Jan 2012.
  14. Nolan, Jim. “Cuccinelli: Va. could exclude gays from National Guard.” Inside NoVa, 31 Jan 2011.
  15. Goodnough, Abby. “Student Faces Town’s Wrath in Protest Against a Prayer.” The New York Times, 26 Jan 2012.
  16. “Rhode Island.” Worldmark Encyclopedia of the States. 2007. Encyclopedia.com. 27 Jan 2012.
  17. Rayfield, Jillian. “Oklahoma GOPer Proposes Bill To Outlaw ‘Aborted Human Fetuses’ In Food.” TPM. TPM Media LLC, 25 Jan 2012.
  18. Graff, Amy. “Rick Santorum: Rape babies are gifts from God.” San Francisco Chronicle. Hearst Communications Inc., 24 Jan 2012.
  19. Gittleson, Wendy. “Tennessee Rep. Says It’s ‘Virtually Impossible’ To Contract AIDS Through Heterosexual Sex.” Addicting Info. 26 Jan 2012.
  20. Bowcott, Owen. “Catholic church tries to clear confusion over condom use.” The Guardian. 23 Nov 2010.

113. poinephobia

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
— Psalm 37:1 (King James Version)

I’ve been a little crazy this week.

This past Sunday marked the first “preview gathering” of SafeHouse Church that many of my friends are a part of, and that Seth (my ex-pseudo lover) is a pastor of. To be honest, I’m a little jealous of what they have going. They’re having meetings, band rehearsals, and volunteer training meetings, and it’s all making me feel unhinged.

Part of it is feeling left out, and this sort of phantom limb pain that comes from the memory of what all of that was like; of being part of a church, being actively involved in the planning and execution of services and events—and most importantly, doing all of that with my friends, and with people I loved and cared about.

In the last entry, I touched on my growing desire to find atheist/nontheist community of my own—my “tribe,” as it were. To find anything close to the equivalent of the church experience for any nontheist is next to impossible. We’re an independent-minded lot. We tend to think for ourselves and resist being herded into anything. It’s more likely that, as many have suggested, I’ll find community in the various groups I eventually volunteer with, sort of piecing together a nontheist “network” from those people I meet. But it won’t ever be anything like what I enjoyed years ago, in church orchestra rehearsals and the like.

That’s over.

It’s a bit like being exiled from your former life. But that begs the question of whether it was ever mine to begin with, and whether all of this wasn’t inevitable, in a way.

There are days when I do miss being a Christian—in particular, the days when I’m feeling lonely and depressed, and there’s no way that anyone can understand the immeasurably dark place that I’m stuck in, and no way that I can humanly express any of it. It would be really nice to have a god who listens. And like that phantom pain, I wish I could get that belief back sometimes. But it’s gone. Even if I wanted to, there’s no way that I could ever go back to being a Christian, not after opening the door to atheism. It’s a bit like Alice going through the tiny door and then eating the cake—you simply don’t belong anymore. As the moral of the story goes in Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat,

“You must not seek to add
To what you have, what you once had;
You have no right to share
What you are with what you were.

No one can have it all,
That is forbidden.
You must learn to choose between.

One happy thing is every happy thing:
Two, is as if they had never been.”

Part of me is also going crazy over everyone being there at church with Seth every week, chatting with him like absolutely nothing is wrong (because for them, nothing is wrong—because he didn’t brutally mangle their hearts); singing “worship” songs along side him to an imaginary god they fancy exists; being at church community events with him; listening to him preach; getting pastoral advice from him (as the “pastor of community care” or whatever the fuck he fancies himself); going to his apartment for dinner/parties where he’ll mix them drinks because he’s also a fucking bartender.

Then there will come the day when he meets someone, and that guy will also be in the lives of all my friends, further alienating me; and this guy will be Seth’s husband/partner, and they’ll love each other and be a staple of the community; and everyone will think what a great couple they are, how wonderful Seth is and how wonderful the other guy is…

Sigh. If you think that sounds like jealous ramblings, you’d be spot on. I fully acknowledge this, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. If there were a way to kill these feelings and forget all about Seth and all that happened between us, I would. Yes, those painful emotional moments are what define us and make us who we are; but this thing is still consuming my mind like a raging, out-of-control fire, nearly a year after the awful, infamous night of my birthday party when he dashed my heart to pieces. It’s almost like these thoughts and feelings are large enough to be another entity entirely.

Yes, some of my ire at the Church is fueled by my love/hatred of Seth—some transference, if you will. It’s completely irrational, and completely and totally unhealthy, but the moment that SafeHouse comes up or is mentioned, I basically turn into a crazy person. All of those raw, barely-beneath-the-surface feelings for him come bursting out and onto the paving stones like sulfuric acid, re-opening those wounds.

And of course this would all be happening right around the time that I formally became an atheist in the first place. It feels as though everyone I know who is going to that church, who I’ve considered my family for some time since my own family is less than welcoming, has slammed the door in my face and is rejecting me by virtue of building a community around the very beliefs that I have rejected so that I can’t be a part of their lives anymore. And these are people with whom I have history, with whom I have shared experiences.

Yes, I’m unhappily single, and that’s a factor (I need a boyfriend!!); but I’m also feeling increasingly isolated. Some of it is me pushing people away—and that’s bad. But I also don’t know where I stand with them now as a nontheist. I’m different, and you can’t choose whether you truly believe or not. It would almost be easier to cut ties with everyone and start fresh. But that’s hardly a mature reaction, nor is it healthy.

… but is this healthy?

112. codification

One of the great things about living in a city is the inordinate proximity and access to basically everything. There are a gadzillion restaurants to choose from and sample; opportunities to attend arts events; and stores of every size and niche to find whatever you happen to be looking for.

One of the downsides of living in the city is being surrounded by a gadzillion people, but still feeling completely alone. Even for those of us who have a ton of friends, we still run the risk of feeling rather isolated. I was talking with a friend about this yesterday; that we have friends who we rarely get a chance to see because we all have so much going on. We have jobs that take up most of our day; errands to run and things to do; then some of us have families and significant others to attend to; and seeing everyone becomes a scheduling nightmare, so we may go months (or years) between seeing certain people.

This is one of the good things about the church that I miss probably more than anything: the built-in, readily available social network. You can get together on Sunday morning for a couple of hours every week and see all of your friends in one place. You can even see them several times a week, at bible studies, choir/band practice, potluck dinners, etc. That sort of thing simply doesn’t exist in the atheist/skeptic community, and it does make me sad.

I’ve been feeling dissatisfied lately with that lack of community in my life. As much as I enjoy the company of my Christian friends (some of whom I’ve known for over ten years, and with whom I have had many wonderful experiences and memories), being with them now isn’t the same as it is being with nontheists. This is something they don’t tell you when you’re first deconverting from Christianity, that your world is about to go topsy-turvy; or if they do tell you, you can’t imagine how extensively everything gets re-written. It’s a bit like going to summer camp or Europe, having an incredibly life-changing experience, and then going home and not feeling like you belong anymore; or that you returned home only to find that your childhood home had been magicked away by a wicked fairy (sorry, I’m nearly done with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and am rather concerned about fairies). It’s what Frodo experiences coming back to the Shire after going to Mordor, when you long to be amongst those who have been on the same journey. As nice as some of my Christian friends are, they simply can’t understand how differently the world looks once you no longer believe in god.

A while ago a friend asked me why it mattered that I needed atheist friends. After all, I have friends who love and care about me. To me, this rather sounds like conservatives asking gays why they want gay marriage instead of civil unions. To those who already have a place of belonging, surrounded by people who (mostly) believe the same things that they do (i.e., believe in god, that this personal god is the “author of human life,” etc), it may sound like atheists are just whining. After all, we chose to leave the church—right? We chose to stop believing in god—right?

We are primates—pretty advanced primates, but primates nevertheless. Like our close cousins, we have a complex social structure based on our belonging to and our place within the tribe. With our larger brain size and capacity for higher intelligence comes self-awareness, and all of the perennial problems associated with it. Instead of sniffing each other’s butts, belonging is more like complex mathematical algorithms now, with a long matching checklist of beliefs, social class, media preferences and so on.

Being a nontheist is a unique experience in humankind today. A thousand years from now our descendants may look back with quaint curiosity at their primitive ancestors embroiled in stupid squabbles over religion and belief. Perhaps in a thousand years belief in gods will have died out, just as the Neanderthals died out 30,000 years ago or so. What must it have been like for the first tribe of homo sapiens to be living amongst their Neanderthal kin, alike but different? For the first time in recent geological human history, there are those amongst us who do not hold belief in gods or the supernatural. We are a small tribe living amongst those who still believe very strongly and very fervently.

But we are growing.

As Richard Dawkins writes in the preface to The God Delusion,

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to ‘come out’, thereby encouraging others to do so. Even if they can’t be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.

It’s one of the reasons why this year I’m planning to get more “activist” about my atheism, and engage in more volunteering in order to start finding and building community.

But how to re-create the community that I enjoyed in the church as a Christian? Is it even possible? And what might it look like? Atheists don’t really believe anything. We have no codified tenets. Some of us had abusive church backgrounds, while some of us (like myself) knew wonderful people; and some of us grew up in secular homes where god was rarely (if ever) mentioned. All that unites us is our non-belief in gods and the supernatural, and our shared humanity.

A few years ago I lived with several friends in an apartment complex. Myself and two guy friends lived in one unit, while three of our girl friends lived next door. Ours became a central “gathering spot” for everyone. I wish our community as atheists and nontheists could look like that.

111. stone

This post is Part II of the previous entry, which talks a bit about the effects of growing up in a fundamentalist Christian home.

The golem in some ways is like a zombie, save that it is wholly artificial. Both are animated by magical means and are (generally) completely subject to their creator’s bidding. They appear alive, but are soulless and empty—half-living, if you will.

The latter part of the last post talked about the effect that our Christian upbringing had on my two younger sisters and me, and the various ways that we have been affected as adults by what we experienced as children. (I should say that my sisters are still conservative Christians, and go to the same church as my parents.) My youngest sister has bi-polar disorder. My younger sister has gone through therapy for anorexia and still thinks she’s fat. As for me, though undiagnosed, it’s likely that I have borderline personality disorder.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders fourth edition (DSM IV-TR) defines borderline personality disorder as:

A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image and affects, as well as marked impulsivity, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

  1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
  2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
  3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
  4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., promiscuous sex, eating disorders, binge eating, substance abuse, reckless driving).
  5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats or self-injuring behavior such as cutting, interfering with the healing of scars (excoriation) or picking at oneself.
  6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).
  7. Chronic feelings of emptiness.
  8. Inappropriate anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
  9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation, delusions or severe dissociative symptoms.

I’m broaching incredibly personal territory by sharing any of this, but that’s what this blog is about, I suppose; and looking objectively at this list, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7 & 8 are definitely true of me. I won’t share too much, but do want to cover the more major aspects of BPD for me.

Anyone who has known me for any significant period of time knows my temper is one of the more unfortunate aspects of being my friend. It rises quickly and sometimes violently, and growing up I pointed to my red hair as the cause. One of the reasons I suspected bi-polar at first was the rate at which my moods shifted, which could be violent and sudden. My mood could go from calm to agitated in seconds, then to depressed hours later.

My temper only got worse during the teen years, when the pairing of puberty (and the subsequent rush of testosterone) and the awakening of my then-aberrant sexuality caused some significant emotional disturbance. There was also the frustration of living under my parents’ thumb and policing, which was seeming more unreasonable, but so much of it had to do with living daily with the dark secret that I was gay and making sure my Christian parents never knew anything about it.

Probably the most significant factor of why I think this is BPD is the violent reactions to rejection that I’ve had over the years, and how practically every relationship I’ve had has operated under the shadow of the fear of abandonment. I form intense attachments with people fairly quickly, often with wild expectations of how those relationships will pan out. This is known as idealization and devaluation, wherein when the attachment is good a person’s positive qualities are exaggerated. When it goes bad, the opposite is true. (This is ultimately what happened with Seth.) Idealization/devaluation is normal in childhood development, and eventually a child grows out of this stage—unless a trauma occurs.

A possible cause for this is that when I was about four, my mom became pregnant with my youngest sister. For some reason—possibly something I’d heard/read about families only having 2.8 children, and not understanding decimals at that age—I assumed this meant that I, as the eldest, would have to leave to make room for the new baby. Since a family could only have two children. My parents didn’t find out about this until shortly before my sister was born, so for months I’d lived in terror of abandonment; and even when they assured me I wouldn’t have to go, at age four the fear was still palpable.

I also tend to identify strongly with people and causes, sometimes to the point of obsession. My personality, which I’ve known for a while can be chameleonic, will sometimes change slightly to adapt to my surroundings. Again, this has to do with the fear of rejection and trying to be as acceptable and likable as possible. However, the driving fear in all of my relationships (friendships or romantic) is that the other person will eventually get bored or I’ll offend them so grievously somehow and they’ll reject me. It’s incredibly pervasive.

In many ways I feel like a half-formed person, like a golem. My parents even expected absolute obedience from us growing up. While I’m able to write about this and articulate feelings, the terrified child lives on in me and filters all of my experiences. It makes it so that I’m unable to truly feel positive emotions, because to an extent I’m always living in fear, always trying to gain my parents’ approval through friends, co-workers, peers, etc.

But it never feels like enough.

My parents have admitted that they made huge mistakes back then. But they can’t turn back the clock, and I’m stuck with finding the way out of the forest on my own. Therapy is expensive, I’m flat broke, and friends (well-meaning as they are) can only help so much…

110. scattering

“The purpose of satire, it has been rightly said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth. And our job, as I see it, is to put it back again.”
— Michael Flanders

One of the most fascinating creatures in mythology is that of the golem, an animated anthropomorphic being in Jewish lore created out of inanimate matter (traditionally clay) and brought into being by a sorcerer or rabbi who inscribes the word emet (אמת, “truth”) on its forehead, or by a tablet with the word inserted in its mouth. The golem is described as being but a shadow of Man (who himself is but a shadow of Almighty God), without a soul and unintelligent but perfectly obedient to the will of the one who animated it. Usually in golem tales there is an element of hubris, with the creation turning on its creator who realizes the error of his ways in the end, or it begins to attack gentiles or other Jews, the point being that god alone has the wherewithal, wisdom and right to create life.

On a similar note, last week I finished watching the anime series Fullmetal Alchemist, which centers on two alchemist brothers who are trying to restore their bodies after a disastrous failed attempt to bring their mother back to life through alchemy. *Spoiler alert!* The main antagonists in the series are beings known as homunculi, human-like creatures created out of the failed attempt to bring someone back from the dead through alchemy. These beings resemble humans but do not possess souls and thus have human-like consciousness but cannot experience emotion.

One of the purposes of this blog is to attempt to synthesize the experience of becoming an atheist after over twenty years of living as an Evangelical, fundamentalist Christian. My earliest recollections involve church and my parents’ faith practice, of reading from the bible as a family or praying together. In some ways, leaving Christianity was like ending an incredibly dysfunctional marriage. However, beyond that, I haven’t talked too much about my parents, who I cut ties with on Christmas Day this year, or the effect our upbringing had on my two younger sisters and myself.

Some who read this blog know my family does not approve of or accept me as a gay man, insisting that gays are broken heterosexuals, and I think that had my parents known about me as a teenager that they would’ve attempted to get me into reparative therapy. However, I want to stress that my parents were never intentionally abusive or cruel, nor do I believe they are bad people; and I believe they genuinely love me, but their theology has shaped (and warped) their views on the world and humanity in a particular way.

My sisters and I grew up in a fairly strict home. We were homeschooled, and a significant portion of our education had a heavy Christian slant. A few weeks ago I cleaned out my old bedroom at my parents’ house and found notebooks, papers and books from those years. Reading it as an adult made me wince. It was such blatant inculcation. For a long time we weren’t allowed to watch television, and even then our watching was closely monitored, our viewing restricted to wholesome, educational programming. While I am thankful to have been exposed to as much classic black-and-white films as we were, we grew up in a cultural vacuum. We spent a lot of time at church volunteering or at different programs (yes, we did AWANAS, and both my parents were leaders).

A peculiar phenomenon of Protestant culture is the morbid fear of pride and self. My dad’s life verse comes from John 3:30, “He [Jesus] must increase, but I [John the Baptist] must decrease.” Consequently, my parents were always afraid of their children becoming conceited or prideful, and our upbringing reflected that. Again, I don’t want to paint my parents as monsters, but we were rarely praised or affirmed. We were punished, and punished often, sometimes for the smallest of infractions. There was one instance where my dad got carried away with a spanking when he thought I’d cursed god. I hadn’t, but he insisted that I had taken god’s name in vain. I still hate my father for that.

There were also a number of occasions where they threatened to send us away to work at the farm of a family friend in Nebraska for misbehaving—along the lines of, “maybe you’ll appreciate what you have here.” This threat was never acted on, but when we were little the thought of being shipped off was terrifying.

As adults, my sisters and I confronted our parents about the fact that we rarely felt loved, accepted or safe growing up. We’ve each manifested this in different ways. All three of us threw ourselves into various pursuits to work for the approval of our parents. My younger sister is a ballet dancer and in her teen years developed anorexia for which she has gone through years of therapy to overcome. While probably not related to our home life, my youngest sister has bi-polar disorder and has substituted a dog for having a boyfriend.

As for me, I pursued music performance, partly to fulfill an aptitude for it but also to win the approval/attention of my father who is a professional trumpeter and college professor, going so far as majoring in music composition for a career in music (which never went anywhere). Despite all of that, I’ve still never felt like any of it’s been good enough.

For a long time I’ve struggled with depression, and for a while wondered if I might have bi-polar disorder too. It’s much more likely though that I’m dealing with something known as borderline personality disorder, a veritable clusterfuck of a diagnosis, consistent with my home life growing up and a lot of the behavioral traits I’ve manifested over the years.

However, I’ll cover that next time since this Starbucks is closing.

G’night, everyone.

109. how

The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella,
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just’s umbrella.
— Lord Charles Bowen (attrib.)

Someone asked me the other night, “what harm can religion do?”

In the context of last night, it was about a recent episode of A Gifted Man, in which a shaman who volunteers at the clinic that Patrick Wilson’s character works at wants to perform a blessing on a baby that was abandoned. The argument was that the baby is too young to really register what’s going on, or to be negatively affected. Yes, it’s nonsense, but there are people in America even who really believe in that idiotic nonsense—that there are spirits in the world that can be entreated, summoned and appeased.

In keeping with my New Years quasi-resolution, I’m trying to not be a wet blanket when it comes to religion, especially considering some of my previous blogs and letters on the subject, and the fact that I’m striving not to alienate the religious friends that I still have who want me to be a part of their community.

… I’m just not 100% sure how that’s supposed to work.

In another episode of A Gifted Man, this same shaman character tells a hypochondriac boy who is side struck by lightening and suffers traumatic brain injury that lightning strikes are often ways of calling a person to be a shaman, a variation on the “everything happens for a reason” theme. “What harm can that really do?” To a boy morbidly terrified of the world, how can such a notion not do harm? It’s assuring him that there is a spirit force guiding his steps, and introducing the notion to him that he too could share this nonsense with others.

Yesterday I was watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from season five, “The Body,” in which Buffy’s mother Joyce suddenly dies and everyone reels from the fallout. Throughout the episode everyone asks why it happened, and at one point the character Anya (a vengeance demon divested of her powers, reduced to a human, and exhibits a Temperance Bones-like understanding of humanity) explodes,

“I don’t understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she’s– there’s just a body, and I don’t understand why she just can’t get back in it and not be dead anymore! It’s stupid! It’s mortal and stupid! And Xander’s crying and not talking, and I was having fruit punch, and I thought, well Joyce will never have any more fruit punch, ever, and she’ll never have eggs, or yawn or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why.”

This is why religion is damaging—because the answers it gives to these huge questions beg more questions. We know why people die. We are fragile, organic beings, susceptible to the elements and to physical damage. We don’t know for sure what happens after death, but it’s more than probable that consciousness is tied to the brain, that it too is a biological function which will cease to exist like all other bodily functions. Neuroscience, in its quest to identify the origins of human consciousness, is increasingly finding that we are our brains, and that “I” can be altered by traumatic injury or physical changes to certain areas of the brain. One episode of WNYC’s RadioLab tells the story of a woman who suffered a major aneurysm and basically woke up a completely different person.

There is no evidence in the world that anything happens other than for the reason that it happens. A 30 kiloampere bolt of lightning strikes a gnat flying through the air at the moment of the discharge. A boulder is dislodged from a mountain after the wind and the rain works upon the stone for thousands of years, and it rolls down the steep incline where it crushes a car that is driving through the pass, killing everyone in the car. We are human. We are subject to same conditions as every other life form on the planet.

My friend Emily told me to wait until I’ve experienced death personally a few times before passing judgement on those who choose to find comfort in religion, and perhaps she’s right. My friends and family are still alive (knock on wood), and I’ve never experienced the kind of loss that violently tears away a person’s sense of security in the world and brings you face to face with human mortality as someone you’ve known your entire life ceases to exist.

I have thought about this. Someday I will inevitably be faced with the death of the man I love more than anything else in the world. Someday everyone I have ever known will die, and someday I too will be tapped on the shoulder and told that it’s time to take leave of the party, which invariably will go on without me.

We are born to die, and while this thought may drive many to despair (theists and non-theists alike), for many atheists this makes our present life all the more meaningful. Our mortality drives us to make every moment on earth count, for we will never be presented with another of its like. It makes the wine a deeper red, for it is the only wine of its kind that has ever been set before us. It makes the sunset that much richer, for it is the only sunset of its kind that will ever pass before our eyes. It makes the kiss that much sweeter, for it is the only kiss of its kind that will brush our lips. Religion robs us those moments, for it tells us that there is a greater reality to come that causes all present experiences to pale in comparison.

Bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad.

The rain rains on the just and the unjust.

Religion tells us this isn’t so.

108. facades

It’s a bit frustrating to be nearly thirty years old and basically starting over in life. It’s true that there’s no check list for where you “should be” by such-and-such an age, but when you suddenly find yourself basically set back at square one after over a quarter century of heading down one particular path, it’s rather disheartening.

True, it could always be worse.

It also doesn’t help being nearly thirty, still being single and watching your friends who are five years younger than you finding their “soul mates” (hell, even writing that word brings the taste of bile to my mouth), getting married and having kids. Yes, I know enough about their personal lives to know that it’s no walk in the park and there’s nothing perfect about it (especially once children enter the picture), but still, it’s got to better than single life. And for a single gay man, the older you get the more you start to feel like a carton of milk in the fridge with a rapidly-approaching expiration date.

Last night I saw the movie Bridesmaids for the first time. I rather expected it to be a female version of The Hangover, with estrogen instead testosterone-induced idiocy. What I saw instead was a film about a single woman hitting rock bottom while surrounded by people who had seemed to have everything she was looking for. Of course, as dig you find that everyone is a mess: the gorgeous housewife is beleaguered by three teenage sons and a horndog of a husband; the sweet, seemingly innocent newlywed isn’t getting laid nearly enough; the Barbie doll socialite has two stepchildren who (understandably) hate her, and her husband is always travelling. Melissa McCarthy’s character is the only one who seems to have it together, despite all of her… eccentricities. And it’s true. If you look closely enough, everyone is more or less barely keeping it together.

I can also relate to dating guy after guy who inevitably disappoints, and to having a fuck buddy who, despite your better judgement, you keep going back to because of how lonely you are; who is just using you for sex under the notion that you’re both adults having fun, no strings attached (though he secretly knows what’s going on but still takes advantage of you). I’ve even had that conversation at the top of the film, where she assures him that of course it doesn’t mean anything, we’re just having fun—even though she’s dying inside.

When (like Kristen Wiig’s character) you’re constantly surrounded by seemingly successful people, constantly reminded by their lives of how far you are from where you want to be, it’s pretty demoralizing. I can’t even count how many weddings/wedding receptions where I’ve been asked the inevitable, perennial question, “So, are you here with anyone?” Or, “Oh, hi, you must be David’s girlfriend!”, only to have to backpedal and explain that not only do I not even know this girl but that I’m also gay. (“No, grandma, I like cock.”) Once I even had to explain that the girl I was with was my younger sister, not my wife.

No joke.

So I’m less than a few weeks away from my twenty-ninth birthday (which, for those of you who are curious, I won’t be observing again, for one glaring reason). Every year since I’ve come out, I’ve made the resolution that this will be the year I buckle down to the business of finding a boyfriend, a partner. Because I’m nearly thirty, not getting any younger, and the older you get the more impossible it seems for a gay man to find a permanent, lasting relationship with a decent guy. And I’ll be damned if I’m one of those pathetic forty- or fifty-year-old men who are still sleeping around like some bloody twentysomething.

It’s brought up the question the past few months of what sort of guy I should date—and specifically, whether I should date someone of faith. It could be any religion, but (for example) a few months ago I was dating a Christian guy. He was fairly liberal in his views, but there were a number of things that irked me about him intellectually to the point where a relationship was untenable. Then his father was diagnosed with cancer. It wasn’t terminal, but he was hurt that I wouldn’t pray for him. What was I supposed to say? I don’t think that things turn out for the best, or that there’s a plan for each of us. I believe that things happen, and we’re each of us caught in the inexorable clutches of time and chance. It’s not a comforting thought, but that’s reality, and I’ve always been one of those that liked to know how things are, devoid of the illusions of comfort and cozy half-truths, like the guy in a Western who’s been shot and blearily slurs, “Give it to me straight, Doc.”

And, assuming that he wants kids, how would we raise them? No doubt he’d want to take them to church on more than a bi-yearly basis, whereas I’d be for a secular upbringing—the upbringing I wish I’d had. While I don’t want to be my parents and bring them up in a vacuum, at what point do you draw the line? Do you turn Sunday morning into a cultural field trip, exploring synagogues, Hindu and Buddhist temples, Protestant and Catholic churches? And how to reconcile that one parent believes in absolute truth whereas the other parent believes faith is patent nonsense?

Then there are things like end-of-life. I support euthanasia (we consider it “humane” to put down dying animals that are suffering), whereas he’ll likely believe that god alone has the right to determine life and death.

However, so much of it will likely come down to chemistry and whether or not we love each other, but I would like to be with a guy with whom I share views, because you do look at the world differently as a non-theist.

107. defriend

Okay. I didn’t actually see it, but after seeing the commercials I had no intention to see it either. And after reading the reviews—most, if not all, of which were unanimously negative—I’m not sorry I missed the pilot of ABC’s Work It. This only crossed my mind because I came down to cook dinner while the roomies were watching TV and a spot came on for it, which sparked a conversation.

Even as a non-transgendered person, I find the very idea of the show offensive on several levels (and most of the reviews confirmed my suspicions). It makes a few ugly insinuations:

  • Puerto Ricans are drug smugglers.
  • All a man needs to do to pass for a woman is don a dress, bra, wig and high heels, and talk in a higher voice (think Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot, which Work It wishes it could but has no chance of ever being).
  • The only reason women have sales jobs is because men want to sleep with them.
  • Men are insensitive Neanderthals.
  • Even when pretending to be women, men are still more successful than those dumb, tampon-sharing women they’re impersonating (who, by the way, can’t tell the difference between another woman and a man obviously in drag).

This is the station that just had a news anchor, Dan Kloeffler, come out publicly as a gay man in October of 2011. ABC Family was voted the most gay inclusive network during 2010-2011. Shows like “Ugly Betty,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Modern Family” have prominently featured gay characters. One of my favorite shows (up until the 5th season, when it all sort of fell apart) was “Brothers & Sisters,” a show my parents deplored due to the inclusion of three openly gay main characters—two of whom were married in the show.

So now for it to come out with trash like Work It?

Counterpoint this with an incident a few weeks ago on Facebook where I ended up deleting a friend after he said that Hulu was “acting up” and was “gay.” When I called him out on this, he came back with, “Oh, c’mon dude, you know what I mean.” *winkwink-nudgenudge* To which I responded, “No. I don’t know what you mean. Enlighten me.” The eye-rolling came loudly through the screen when he came back with, “Gay as in stupid. Not gay as in homo.” (“Homo”?) Then several of his friends rushed to his defense, saying that I was overreacting. One guy even chimed in, “Hey, guy, I’m bi and I’m not offended.”

Right, because… oh, nevermind, I’m not going to get into bisexuality in males, which is pretty rare and often a way of cowardly eschewing the label of homosexual—as if to say, “hey, I like pussy too!” Because real men like vaginas. Even the ones who also like la bite.

The moral of the story is that I ended up de-friending him over the incident. That may be a bit reactive, but it would’ve been one thing if he’d thought it over and realized that using that particular word as pejorative might be hurtful and offensive to gays and lesbians. It was how little he and those who commented seemed to care, and the fact that nobody noticed the insidious logic. Because it’s not like anyone has been maligned, mistreated or murdered for being gay…

“Gay” came into use as a pejorative in the 1970s: “That’s so gay.” It was a way of putting down effeminate (and therefore “gay”) behavior in men, and quickly became an easy insult amongst young people who adopted it as slang. Gay = stupid (read: “those dumb faggots!”). Because, as we know, all gays are stupid. Just like the women of Work It who’re too dumb to realize that their new co-workers are a couple of dudes in really bad drag.

What bothers me is not so much that drag is being used for a cheap laugh. It’s one of the oldest stand-bys in theatre. They say that laughter fills uncomfortable silences (I’m not 100% who said that though), and what makes people more uncomfortable than seeing a male pretending to be a female, temporarily emasculating himself in front of an audience? Of course, when we’re all in on the joke it’s funny.

It’s not so funny when you’re the joke though.

It speaks to these deep-seated fears we have as a society about masculinity and the fragile thing that it is. It can be undone in an instant, which is why a woman can have a lesbian “phase” and go on to be a “normal” wife and mother, but a man is gay for life if he has just one sexual encounter with another man. It’s why the gay character (male or female) is such a staple: think Nathan Lane in Frankie & Johnny; Harvey Fierstein in Mrs. Doubtfire; Rupert Everett in My Best Friend’s Wedding. With few exceptions, their sole function is to provide a clever foil to the protagonist and sage advice via witty banter. They are rarely given external lives beyond this, and aside from a few cliched bits (which are almost always played for a laugh, such as in Internal Affairs, when the characters played by Andy Garcia and Laurie Metcalf realize they are checking out the same woman) are essentially treated as non-sexual.

It makes the gay character a stereotype, someone so impossibly larger-than-life that he or she could never really exist in real life. And therefore an entity to not be concerned about.

Yes, using “gay” may be a trope for most people. I doubt images of homosexuals being burned alive in the Middle Ages, “corrective” rape, teens hung in Iran, or of Matthew Shepherd tied to a fence post and beaten to death spring to mind for them. Nor were the creators of Work It intentionally making light of issues that transgender people face everywhere—and not just in the workplace.

Yet they’re unwittingly reinforcing the notion that to be anything less than heterosexual is to be less than human.

106. review

What’s a year, really? 12 months? 52 weeks? 525,600 minutes (or, when I asked Google, 525,948.766 minutes)? Does the earth wake up as it’s hurtling around the sun at a dizzying 67,000 miles per hour (that’s 107,000 kilometers per hour for my metric friends) and think, “I say! This looks awfully familiar. Haven’t I been here before?” After all, it doesn’t have much else to think about. It’s cleared its orbital zone, except for the occasional stray asteroid or comet that waltzes into its path that occasionally crashes into it.

This is nothing compared to how fast we’re hurtling around our home galaxy. The sun (and therefore the earth as well and all that’s on it) is moving at an incredible 483,000 miles per hour (792,000 km/hr). We orbit once every 225 million years.

225 million years ago (Mya), the earth was in the beginning stages of the Mesozoic Era, in the middle of the Triassic Period known as the Carnian stage; with the continents having just formed into one massive supercontinent known as Pangea. There were no ice caps as the continental mass was centered around the equator, and earth was hot and dry. Tiny dinosaurs called archosaurs were beginning to evolve, along with the ancestors of the first mammals—tiny shrew-like creatures called adelobasileus that appeared about 225 Mya.

That should give us some perspective on what has happened in the past galactic year.

The primates (our direct ancestors) appeared about 65 Mya. The genus Homo didn’t appear until around 2.5 Mya, and even then, Homo sapiens (modern humans) didn’t evolve until about 200,000 years ago. Putting that in terms of mean solar time, if we were to set a timer for 60 minutes…

  • 5 minutes after we hit “start” (when the earth began its galactic “year”), the first mammals begin to appear;
  • 15 and a half minutes later, North America separates from Africa;
  • 42 minutes later a meteor crashes into Chicxulub, in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, resulting in the mass extinction of 80-90% of marine life and 85% of land species, including the dinosaurs;
  • 43 minutes later, primates appear;
  • With a minute to go, at 58 seconds, upright walking hominins appear;
  • At 59.81 seconds, Human and Neanderthal lineages start to diverge genetically;
  • At 59.85 seconds, Heidelberg Man develops speech;
  • Modern man appears just milliseconds before the timer goes off.

We’ve barely been on this earth. We can trace our first modern male ancestor back to about 60,000 years ago, but in terms of the galactic “year,” all of recorded history is but a fraction of a millisecond.

If that though doesn’t fill you with awe, wonder and amazement — nothing will.

Then there’s an illustration on Wikipedia of the Earth’s location in the known universe, which is equally awe-inspiring. As Douglas Adams wrote, describing the horrific torture device known as the Total Perspective Vortex,

When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here.”

All that is to say that 2011 was a pretty awful year for many of us, and we weren’t sorry to see it go.

I did have hopes going into 2011:

  • By now I’d have at least gotten more established in musical theatre;
  • That I’d have found a day job that was enjoyable and would be more financially stable;
  • That I’d be in a serious relationship by now;
  • That come early summer I’d have a home church in SafeHouse, and possibly even a relationship with Seth;
  • That I’d have achieved more success with my compositions.

Looking back on it now, none of those hope and dreams came anywhere close to being met:

  • I started a temp job in February that I ended up loving; that seemed like it might lead to a career until it abruptly ended at the end of November;
  • I had a horrific experience music directing Sound of Music where I had little support from theater staff or production crew (including the director); was constantly undermined by a number of key auxiliary cast members (my principles and orchestra rocked though); and subsequently never wanted to direct another musical again;
  • I had my heart broken by Seth in the worst possible way on my birthday, which led to becoming an atheist and losing that community I was looking forward to being a part of in SafeHouse, along with my faith (although in a way, my coming out as an atheist was as inevitable as my coming out a gay man—that is to say, both should’ve happened much sooner);
  • I had a string of unsuccessful and very disappointing dates, flings and relationships, all of which left me feeling less desirable, more defective and unlovable, and less hopeful of ever finding a guy who wants to commit to me as much as I do to him;
  • My trumpet sonata was premiered in Tacoma in June, but sadly that performance hasn’t led to more opportunities like I thought it might. I’d sort of hoped that trumpet players might hear it and want to pick it up to learn it, and maybe even commission new works for trumpet from me, which would lead to more visibility, more musicians knowing my name and my work, and commissioning more and more work. But no.

Add to that that at the end of this year (on Christmas Day, to be precise), I gave my dad the last $225 dollars that I owed him for my car, whereupon he gave me the title to said car; and I told him and my mom and that I wanted nothing more to do with them again— at least so long as they hold their fundamentalist beliefs about homosexuality.

  • So, to close out 2011, I divorced the family that I’ve had for twenty-eight years.

That’s heavy stuff.

I feel even less sure of myself going into 2012 than I did going into 2011. That beginning was similar to this year’s: with not knowing what my job prospects are; waiting to hear from the temp agency about job possibilities while sending out resumes in the chance of striking gold; and generally feeling miserable, lonely and depressed.

Pathetic.

I’ve said this before, but I feel as though I seriously fucked up in college. Majoring in music composition seemed like the perfect idea, and the future seemed so certain. Everyone thought that I showed great potential and talent as a composer. I’d be a working composer by, well, twenty-eight.

What I didn’t factor was that I had no business sense or training. That I’d had my head in the clouds during high school and college, focusing so narrowly on the Arts, on music and writing. That I’d failed to develop any Real World skills. And the economy drying up.

Then I’d graduated with said degree in music composition and…

… now what was I going to do?

Most of the people I know who are successful figured out fairly early what they were good at and wanted to do, and started doing it. They got the education they needed or cultivated the skills and the experience. And I feel as though I realized too late that I started down the wrong career path, and it’s a dead end. I’m not even good enough at what I am trained at. I’ve worked a variety of office jobs. I do okay, but always seem to find myself in situations where opportunities to impress my supervisors arise, and I try, but quickly find myself in way over my head.

And I crash.

So I don’t know what to do. A few hundred years ago I could’ve found gainful employ with the Church directing a choir, or with the nobility as a court musician, or even as a writer. And I’m apparently barely passable as any of those. Today you have to be extremely good and extremely clever (or lucky) to make it like that. I’m detail oriented, yes; but I lack the organizational and strategic-thinking skills that are needed to be truly successful.

This is normally where a manager comes in: someone who recognizes that an individual possesses talent—but not necessarily savviness. Often that means just being in the right place at the right time. And I’ve no clue how to make that sort of thing happen. Ira Glass randomly discovered David Sedaris reading his diary in a Chicago club in the early ’90s—a discovery that led to the publication of the SantaLand Diaries, his account of working as a seasonal elf in Macy’s SantaLand during Christmastime in New York City.

He got lucky.

Artists have a somewhat symbiotic, commensalist relationship with society. We don’t really contribute anything tangible to society, aside from making it more aesthetically pleasing perhaps. Kind of like remora fish and sharks. We provide “valuable services,” but the shark could get by just fine without us.

So while hurtling through the universe at 483,000 miles per hour, circling a nuclear fireball at 67,000 miles per hour, at the bottom of a deep gravity well, I’m looking hard at myself and must conclude:

I feel like a failure.