192. solstice

My breakfast this morning was two tumblers of whisky (neat), about three fingers each. This after getting up to feed and water the dogs I’m looking after for the month. No sense in them going hungry. I got an email last night from the University of Michigan at 11:10PM, which seems an odd hour to be sending emails. A bit like waiting until you know someone’s gone to leave a voicemail. The email read:

I regret to inform you that your application for admission to the Music Composition MA program at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance has not been approved. We are therefore unable to offer you the opportunity to audition. This decision is based on a careful review by the faculty committee of your pre-screening recording and your application materials. The staff of the Admissions Office and the Composition faculty are not able to provide individual feedback from student auditions because of the volume of candidates to consider. We ask your understanding and thank you in advance. As you continue your college search, I know that you will find another school at which to pursue your studies. We wish you continued success and every good wish for a career that will fully utilize your interests and abilities.

Basically, a “thanks for trying, now fuck off” email. This might not have been such a blow had my temp job not ended yesterday, a week and a half early than what I was planning on. It also might not be such a disappointment were I not single again for the holidays. Last year was the first time in a while that I’ve been employed during the Yule season, and the first time ever that I’ve been dating someone for a major holiday. Now I’m back to where I was in 2011, when I told my parents that I wanted nothing more to do with them for their bigotry, I was still reeling from heartbreak and my loss of faith, and I’d just been laid off from another temp job right after Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving. As in, thanks a lot. There are still two applications out there that might yield something, but I’m terrified now that the results will be the same there—that my work just isn’t good enough on its own to merit a place as a cohort in graduate school. A friend of mine tells me that it may have nothing to do with the quality of my application or compositions; that it’s more about finding a group of students that coalesce together. If that’s the case, I may never get into grad school as I’m really an oddball when it comes to music. And everything else. What I’m terrified over is the prospect of yet another year of living in purgatory. I’m tired of working these temp jobs that pay far below the skill level required for the work the client needs performed. I’m sick of being expendable. I’m sick of working with the 9-to-5ers, the workaday folk who go home after a long day at the office of doing something they ultimately don’t care about and aren’t invested in; who are planning to working long enough to cash in on their 401K pension and retire somewhere comfortable. This is not the world I belong in. Remember this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ofKJ6UFv60 Instead of a Shakespearean subtext, my inner voices have quite another Jungian game going on:

• Id: Running back and forth, simultaneously trying to make ends meet and bash my head against a wall to get anything artistic done.
• Ego: Uncertain about whether I’ve made the right career decision or whether my music is even good enough to pursue a career in, even though it’s pretty much the only thing I’m really good at and give a fuck about.
• Superego: Those strident subconscious voices that are difficult to shake, like Christianity:
  • Every single rejection letter or person who has rejected my music, told me that it’s too difficult, or that it’s just not very good.
  • My lack of business sense and self-promotion; of knowing how to strategize, network, who to talk to, how to talk to people, etc.
  • Frustration over my dating life and singleness; over how I haven’t found a guy yet who ultimately doesn’t disappoint me (cf, Fiona Apple); how my current scheme is to find a like-minded guy at grad school; feeling anxiety over nearly being 31 and that I’m at the age where younger guys who are into “older guys” are interested in me but not interested in a relationship.

That bloodcurdling scream the girl playing Ophelia lets out at the end of that scene? That’s the sound in my head almost all the time these days. “Get thee to a nunnery” indeed. I’ve also grown weary of the Midwest and its seemingly provincial attitude toward sophisticated art and music. I once shared the recording of my senior composition recital with a supervisor of mine, and he called it “long-haired music,” a reference (I suppose) to graduate students of the 60s and 70s being somewhat shaggy in appearance. I’ve sent pieces of mine to ensembles all over the Twin Cities, hoping to get performances, or the very least readings. No bites. If I get feedback at all, it’s usually something to the effect of: It’s really not what we’re looking for. … thanks, now go fuck yourself. It’s difficult not to think that I’m the common denominator here. What’s more probable? That hundreds of people have had the same independent reaction to my music, or that my work just… sucks? The latter is what I’m afraid of. We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks as I wait to see what happens with the Eastman School of Music and with the University of Southern California. I have a little hope, but not a lot. In the meantime, Christmas is in four days and I feel like drinking myself silly to forget that I’m single and miserable, and that my entire family is fundamentalist Christians.

186. serotinal

How did it get to be September already? It seems just yesterday that it was snowing and twenty-below-zero. Now August is spent and gone and we’re running pell-mell into autumn. Soon the leaves will be changing color and falling off trees, and we’ll be digging our way out of snowdrifts and cursing the fact that Minnesotans forget how to park in the winter.

Incidentally, I learned the word “pell-mell” around age seven or eight from the Hardy Boys book The House on the Cliff: “The other boys followed, running pell-mell through the hallway and clattering down the stairway” (p. 15). These were some of my favorite books growing up, and they opened a door in my mind to literature and to writing.

One of the things that most sticks in my mind about those books was the fact that the boys seemed to always be getting naked—or at least mostly naked:

• “Tony began to peel off his clothes.” (p. 91, House on the Cliff)
• “Frank and Joe took off their slacks, T shirts, sweaters, and sneakers.” (p. 97, House on the Cliff)
• “Let’s take off our socks, shirts, belts, and sweaters.” (p. , The Clue of the Screeching Owl)
• “He stripped down to his shorts and Joe did the same.” (p. 161, Secret of the Caves)

Of course, there’s no reason to think that any of this was meant to be homoerotic. These books were first written in the 1920s. It was a different time. If anything, it’s a sad commentary on our own age that we now interpret instances of male intimacy as indicative of homosexuality. Boys and men used to get naked all the time, and enjoy being naked together, without it being erotic, or analyzed and pathologized. To be sure, there were certainly gay men forced to find each other in dark, secret places to avoid detection and punishment. We see some of this in books like E. M. Forster’s Maurice, Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, and Christopher Isherwood’s I Am a Camera, which provided the basis for the musical Cabaret.

To my young homosexual mind, however, these instances in the Hardy Boys books were teeming with sexual tension, and they provided me with the material for my earliest fantasies of male-on-male intimacy. In fact, one of the first times I can remember being sexually aroused was in chapter five of The Secret of the Caves:

[Joe] kicked off his shoes and flung himself on top of the bedspread.

Too exhausted to undress, Frank did the same. The boys slept soundly for several hours.

Frank awakened first and thought he was having a nightmare. A pillow was pressed hard over his face and a powerful hand pinned his shoulder to the mattress.

Trying to cry out, Frank kicked wildly and flung the intruder away from the bed. Someone hit the opposite wall with a thud and crashed to the floor. The noise aroused Joe who sprang up, wild-eyed, and looked around the room. [p. 39]

No worries, it’s just their friend, Biff Hooper (described as “tall and lanky,” blonde, and an “amateur boxer”), playfully holding Frank down on the bed as a joke. I didn’t yet have the emotional vocabulary for why this scene excited me so much, or why it looped on virtual continuous playback in my mind. I would later discover firsthand the palpable thrill of male sexual play and wrestling, and the masculine roughness and uninhibitedness that was already such a turnon to me when I first read the above passage.

Almost all of the boys in these books are athletically inclined. Both Frank and Joe play football and baseball (Frank is a pitcher—heh), but Joe is the smarter of the two, playing with transistor radios or tinkering with motorbikes, so I always had more of a crush on Joe. It’s funny now to think that my parents were unwittingly aiding my development as a young gay man by giving me these books to read. I’m not even ashamed to admit that, as a teenager, some of the focus of my *aheh* “alone time” was Joe Hardy. At least, the Joe Hardy of my imagination.

Autumn is a time of transition and reflection. The leaves change color as the youth and vigor of spring and summer fade and shift with the tilt of the Earth away from the sun. Farmers bring in crops sowed in early spring and tended to all through the summer.

I too have been doing reaping of my own, thinking about my growing up years as a closeted teenager and trying to make sense of the time lost, both as a Christian and as a gay man. As my circle of gay friends increases, I’m coming more into contact with couples who met in their early twenties and have been together for years, their relationships deepening and becoming more knowing and intimate. They’re buying houses, adopting children, going on trips, and in general making lives together.

Many of my friends met each other around the same time that I was graduating college and just beginning to come to terms with the fact that I would never be a heterosexual man as my family and friends assumed that I was.

These relationships aren’t perfect by any means, but with every day that passes I’m reminded of the fact that I’m not getting any younger and that time is slipping by. Like the leaves, my own hair has started to change color. I’ve recently started noticing grey hair at my temples.

I don’t want to waste any more of the years that are left to me. I spent too many years trying to be someone else, and am finally getting to know who I really am. Life is short enough as it is, and I would rather spend my life getting to know a beautiful and fascinating man, and investing time and love in each other.

182. muster

Saw a caption a few weekends ago on one of the blogs I follow that read: “Don’t go to bed alone this #PRIDE weekend.” It accompanied the picture of an adorable, lightly bearded guy in briefs laying in bed with a sexy “come hither” look.

I certainly wouldn’t have kicked him out of bed, but that’s not exactly the kind of thing I go for these days.

Minneapolis Pride (or “Gay Pride,” as my mom refers to it) was a few weeks ago at the end of June. And I decided to skip it entirely this year. My friends (gay and straight) who found out I didn’t go reacted with surprise to horror.

“But, it’s Pride!” they all seemed to be saying. “Isn’t that, like, gay Christmas?”

I didn’t go the first couple years after I came out, partly because I wasn’t interested, but mostly because I didn’t know anyone to go with. My first few years as an openly gay man were lonely, truth be told. Aside from the handful of hookups I had in the months after I broke up with my first boyfriend, I didn’t know many other gays. It really isn’t until late last year that my circle of friends became much more gay-weighted.

My first Pride event was about two years ago, when I went with Kristian, a guy I dated for a few months. Last year I manned booths for Minnesota Atheists and the HRC, the latter at which I got badly sunburned and a mild case of sunstroke. There were plenty of hot, virtually naked guys to look at; plenty to drink (if you don’t mind cheap beer that’s overly priced and that one has to get cash for); and plenty to do, but that was about it.

This year… I dunno. It feels as though I haven’t stopped moving since relocating to Uptown at the beginning of June. There’s been a lot to do with cleaning and making my new apartment liveable (there were three straight guys living here before me, and the managers didn’t do much to clean up after them when they moved out), and also simply socializing with people now that I’m so close to everything in this area.

Another factor was the passage of both the marriage bill in Minnesota and the overturning of section 3 of DOMA, and knowing that there were going to be a ton of couples there, many of which were likely planning weddings. And there I’d be, by myself (even if it was with friends), and feeling like that there’s this special, exclusive club that I’m not a member of.

Mostly it came down to my frustration with just not feeling like I belong in the “gay community.” I realize that there are a lot of people who also feel this way, and also that there’s no monolithic way to be “gay.” Hell, the whole premise of the LGBT movement is diversity, right?

So why didn’t I feel that I really belonged at Pride?

Part of it is the party atmosphere that seems to pervade both Pride events and gay male culture in general. It’s one orgiastic celebration of… something. From the pounding shitty house music to the drag queens to the raucous laughter… it’s not really my cup of tea. I don’t do well with forced merriment. It’s the garlic to my vampire — a sure-fire method to keep me away.

I just don’t feel very “gay.” All I share in common with most gay men is our mutual attraction to other men. That’s about it.

• I could care less about Perez Hilton, Ru Paul, fashion, gossip, or pop culture. I’ve managed to remain relatively Glee-free, and intend to keep it that way.
• Gay bars? Too loud, crowded, and mostly full of obnoxious twinks. Or older men who still think they’re twinks.
• Calling other men “her” or “miz”? *Gag.*
• Obsession with show tunes? Only if they were penned by Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, Jason Robert Brown, Noël Coward, or Kurt Weill. Aside from Sondheim, most gay men I know haven’t a clue who the other three I listed are.
• “Opera queens” sobbing over Romantic operas (e.g., Puccini, Verdi, Donizetti)? Not me. Edward Rothstein penned a New York Times essay in 1993 about the intimate relationship between gay men and opera. In it, Wayne Koestenbaum is quoted as saying: “We [gay men] turn to opera because we need to breathe.” Spare me that bullshit. I will say that, thanks to my friend Matthew, I have a growing appreciation for Wagner, but it feels more akin to collegiate admiration than the growings of a deep, abiding passion.

There have been times in the years that I’ve come out when I’ve felt pressure to “act” more “gay,” as if people (especially my women friends) expect me to be more like the stereotype of a gay man — i.e., queeny, witty, frivolous, overly dramatic, etc. And that’s not me. What I said when I came out holds true today: I’m the same person I’ve always been, albeit more honest.

Basically, there is virtually nothing “campy” or feminine about me, not because I’m self-loathing but because it doesn’t interest me. This is a primary reason I feel alienated from the gay community. I don’t feel that I “fit in.” I feel no need for luxury, as epitomized by “old guard” gays like Liberace. In terms of decorating and clothes, I prefer a sparser, more “masculine” style. The music I like tends to be angular, rhythmically and harmonically complex and muscular and characteristically unromantic, a fact that scandalizes most of the gay men I share that fact with.

Also—I don’t want to have sex with every guy I see, nor am I capable of doing so. (Thus, why gay clubs don’t really appeal to me.) Honestly, I don’t see guys as meat, or as conquests. I have to really connect with someone to get to that level of intimacy.

In short: I’m me. An iconoclast. And always will be.

179. balk

“Please know that I am deeply sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change… You have never been my enemy. I am very sorry that I have been yours.”

Dear Alan Chambers,

I read your funny little note today. Or it would be funny if it weren’t so deeply offensive to me and to every gay person you’ve helped murder, maim, mangle, dehumanize and abuse over the many years of your “ministry” as president of Exodus International.

Fortunately, I am not one of those “ex-gay” survivors (i.e., victims). I was never desperate enough to fully buy into the lie that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, or that my sexual orientation needed “curing.” Frankly, I’m not sure why this is when so many of my friends willingly subjected themselves to the brand of psychological terrorism your organization helped promote. They did this out of a desperate, last-ditch hope that it would make them acceptable enough for your so-called God, and for their families who ultimately failed in the duty to show them unconditional love.

Perhaps it was my parents’ instilling of critical thinking skills in me at an early age that never allowed me to fully accept their and my church’s teaching about homosexuality. There was a small but present voice in my mind (that, thanks to teachings about demons and “spiritual warfare,” I attributed to the Devil tempting me) that said, “This doesn’t make sense.”

And why should it? Why would we willingly choose a “lifestyle” that for too many of us results in the hostile rejection of our friends and family, being taunted, called names, beaten up (and too often brutally murdered), demonized and hated — all for simply loving a person of the same sex?

That’s right — straight people have relationships; faggots just want sex.

“… If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

I was never desperate or foolish enough to pursue so-called “reparative” therapy. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t spend the majority of my teen years in pained anguish over what I believed were filthy and repulsive sexual feelings, pleading with God almost every single night growing up to take those feelings away.

It doesn’t mean that there aren’t 25 years of my life that I’ll never get back because I believed the bullshit that God’s “design” for human beings was heterosexuality.

It doesn’t mean that my young adult life were desperately lonely and miserable as I watched my straight friends date, fall in love, and get married, something I thought wasn’t an option for me because our holy book said that marriage was between a man and a woman.

So forgive me if I find it infuriatingly laughable when you say that you’re not my enemy. You’re worse than my enemy. You’re a disgusting quisling, a self-loathing, self-hating collaborator against your own kind. You’ve ruined lives with your teachings. You’ve all but put the gun in the hand or kicked the chair out from under who knows how many innocent LGBT people who couldn’t live with the life you and others told them they had to live in order to get to Heaven — all because they were unfortunate enough to have been born different than 95% of the human population.

And for that you’re sorry? Like Steve Urkel lamenting, “Did I do that?”

The only good thing to came out of this nightmare for me is that I was well prepared for the realizations that (1) religion is nonsense, and (2) there is no God. For me, these conclusions were inevitable. I was never the kind of person who can blindly accept given propositions as fact. It would’ve been nice if these realizations could’ve come earlier, and with less grief and pain, but they are hard-won, and they are mine. And I’m building a new, happier, freer life for myself, without the lies and self-hatred that I was fed growing up.

It would’ve also been nice if I could have accepted my sexuality earlier, and in a family where I could’ve been accepted for who I am rather than who they believe I should be. But then, I wouldn’t be the unique, strong, dynamic and caring individual that I am today. It has been a long, difficult road to accepting myself, but I doubt that I’d appreciate the joy of love and relationships in the same way had I not known the despair and broken loneliness first.

However, I hold you personally responsible for the grief, loss and pain I suffered, in the full knowledge that you’re merely a part of the system that oppressed and subjugated you too. Yet you willingly participated in that oppression and subjugation by becoming an oppressor yourself. You taught millions of gay men and women to hate and loathe themselves, and to bury themselves alive in unfulfilling relationships with members of the opposite sex because the leaders of your church taught that this is “God’s will.”

So until you figure out a way to go back in time and prevent every person from going through the life of pain and misery you inflicted on them, there is no forgiveness for you, or your kind. All I hope is that you devote the rest of your sad life to dismantling the lies about LGBT people that you’ve promoted and fostered over the years.

But there is no forgiveness for you. There may be others who can find it in their hearts to do so, and good for them. But you will be my enemy until the day you die and leave this planet to those of us who want to build a more kind, peaceful and tolerant world.

 

148. integument

One of the things that I hope to accomplish in writing about my experience as both a gay man and as an ex-Christian is to give hope and courage to those who are struggling with their sexuality or over their doubts about their faith. Regarding faith, there’s definitely a place for doubt and for questioning, but there comes a point where you have to ask yourself if there’s genuine belief within you or if your doubts are your intellect trying desperately to tell you something about yourself.

Regarding sexuality, there is no such thing as questioning. There may be confusion within a person over the kinds of sexual desire he or she is experiencing, whether those feelings be heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual; or an even more frightening reality of an individual coming to the realize that he or she is transsexual—that is, that he or she was born one sex but knows at his or her core, in the same way that you and I know that we are the sex we are, that he or she is the opposite. From conversations with transsexual friends, I know now how incredibly difficult and lonely a road this can be—but it shouldn’t be.

Yet still, there should be no questioning, or at least there shouldn’t be a culture that forces an individual to question what they know in their heart to be true.

This is especially true of conservative, anti-gay blogger Jonathan Merrit, who was came out recently as gay but has unfortunately taken the sad route of self-loathing Christian gays who make their mea culpas and then go into “therapy” (i.e., “reparative”, ex-gay therapy). They come out as a way of encouraging other closeted gays to do the same—to throw themselves on the “unconditional love” of their hateful communities and to seek “help” from monstrous so-called therapists who promise to be able to “fix” them (i.e., make them “normal”, i.e., heterosexual).

What Jonathan Merrit needs is help to accept himself as a beautiful human being who happened to be born homosexual. Although I never sought therapy (thankfully), having been there myself as a once-Christian gay man I know how terrifying and lonely it is to come out of the closet, especially when your entire community is made up almost exclusively of conservative Christians who believe that homosexuality is a sin and an abomination.

There is no brokenness about homosexuality. If there was, fundamentalists wouldn’t be fighting so hard against it and lying so much about it. If there was, all homosexuals would be leading disastrous lives and dying at age 42 (or whatever age they’ve worked out we die at). If there was, the president of Exodus International wouldn’t say that he’s never met a gay person who’s successfully changed their orientation, and Robert Spitzer wouldn’t have renounced his research finding that ex-gay therapy worked.

Regardless of whether you belief in God (or god(s)) or not, it’s such a waste of an already short existence on this wonderful planet to strait-jacket yourself into a life of loneliness and misery in order to satisfy the demands of a community that refuses to acknowledge any perspectives other than their bigoted, narrow, judgmental and puritanical one.

So my call to action for today is for anyone who reads this and agrees with the sentiment to write to Jonathan Merrit and plead with him to not go down the road of self-loathing and unhappiness and to embrace and love himself and the way that he was born. Plead with him to accept the potential happiness that’s there if he’ll just venture outside and look for it. I did, and my only regret is not having met my wonderful boyfriend Jay sooner.

http://jonathanmerritt.com/contact.html

---

Jonathan,

I saw the article this morning on The Advocate about your coming out as gay, and have to say that while I admire the courage it took to admit that publicly, even under pressure to do so, I’ve been where you are. I was born into a Christian family and was raised in the fundamentalist tradition, but came out as gay in 2008 at age 26 after over a decade of struggling with feelings that conflicted with the teaching of my faith. I did so after an extensive amount of research into the clinical and scientific origins of homosexuality, as well as researching the truth about what history and the Bible truly says about it. What I found is that there is nothing in the Bible to suggest that it condemns committed relationships between same-sex couples, and that there is no evidence in the scientific community to indicate homosexuality is anything but natural. What’s unnatural and harmful is attempting to alter your sexual orientation when there’s nothing wrong with the one you have.

It’s impossible to express to you the regrets I have over all of the wasted years that came with fighting with my innate nature and with not coming out sooner. But there was also an indescribable relief at finally embracing who I am. I had to ask myself whether it was more natural to try to fight what had come without bidding (I had no exposure to the “gay lifestyle” growing up) or to accept the evidence within myself. I have no regrets about that decision today. It took some time and looking, but I’m with the man I plan on spending my life with, and here’s nothing different about our love from that of my parents or any of my heterosexual friends who are married.

What I want to say by all of that is don’t throw away the chance to find that for yourself by throwing in your lot with the ex-gay community. Your “indiscretion” showed where your heart truly lies, and what it truly desires, and that’s not wrong. I know from experience that it may seem like giving up to “give in” to what the Church calls temptation, but it’s not giving up to truly embrace who you are. Listen to your heart.

Much love,
David Philip Norris

144. natch

On April 15, 1912, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg while en route from Southampton in England to New York City. I don’t need to say much about the disaster. There are documentaries and movies enough on the subject. The most poignant aspect for me about this story is the breakdown of survivors and those who died. The majority of the victims were men, as men were expected to give up their seats on the lifeboats for the women and children. 1,387 men died in the water that night.

The greatest number of casualties were, not surprisingly, amongst the third class passengers, of which there were 706 altogether. 84% (387 of 462) of male and 54% (89 of 165) of female steerage passengers perished. 66% (52 of 79) of their children didn’t make it either. The second class didn’t fare much better. Of the 168 men, 154 (92%) were lost. The second class women were luckier: of 93, only 13 (14%) died. Amazingly, all of the children in second class survived.

In first class, the men bore the heaviest toll, with 66% (118 of 175) never making it to New York City. Still, that’s significantly less than the lower two classes. Of the 144 women aboard in first class, only 4 (3%) died; and of the 6 children, only 1 didn’t make it.

That’s a lot of numbers, but those numbers speak volumes in terms of the human loss of life, of the drama of that story and of the terror and hopelessness that these people went to their deaths with. These were 1,514 individuals with their own unique stories, loves and losses that died in the water that night. Doubtless some of them died believing that their merciful God would save them or at least accept their souls into heaven—probably the greatest and cruelest tragedy of all.

It also speaks to the subjective standards by which human lives were weighed. Your chances of survival on the Titanic that night were predetermined by how much you paid for your ticket, and therefore how valuable you were based on your class. Steerage passengers were corralled below decks like animals and had little access to the lifeboats.

This brings me to my topic for today, which is a familiar topic for many who follow this blog: the religious opposition to gay marriage.

Today the ironically named conservative group Minnesota for Marriage posted a new “marriage minute” which addresses the question: “I have heard people talk about same-sex marriage interfering with ‘Religious liberty’ principles. What does that mean?”

This is probably the most popular argument from religious conservatives—that if marriage is redefined as genderless it will result in the persecution of religious individuals and groups. Churches that refuse to perform same-sex marriages will lose their tax-exempt status (which I and many others don’t think they should have anyway). Christians who speak out against same-sex marriage or gay rights will be thrown in jail. Christian businesses that refuse to, for example, print wedding invitations for same-sex couples will be fined or lose the business altogether. Basically… GAYPOCALYPSE!!

This is one of the loudest talking points for conservatives. They have the nerve and audacity to cling to the Constitution in order to protect their right to discriminate—laws never intended to enshrine religious discrimination or prejudice. Quite the opposite. As a cartoon on the website Slap Upside the Head reads, “Not being able to treat gays as second-class citizens makes me a second-class citizen!” ThinkProgress had a great article about this a few months ago titled “Inside NOM’s Strategy: Use ‘Religious Liberty’ As A Catalyzing Red Herring.” In it, they quote from a memo that included the following passage:

We have learned how to make the coercive pressures on religious people and institutions an issue in the United States. We will use this knowledge to raise the profile of government attacks on the liberties of religious people and institutions in Europe, both for internal domestic consumption in Europe and to halt the movement towards gay marriage worldwide. Our goal is to problematize the oppression of Christians and other traditional faith communities in the European mind.

So yet again, conservatives are resorting to fearmongering and post hoc reasoning in order to scare the Faithful into the voting booth in November. At the risk of invoking Godwin’s law, this is precisely how Hitler was able to gain support in Germany: by manufacturing a threat (in this case, that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s financial woes) in order to rally the people to his side. And as we know now, it worked quite effectively. Here we have groups like NOM and Minnesota for Marriage doing exactly the same thing in response to the “crisis” of the looming threat of gay marriage.

Why shouldn’t a business that refuses a gay couple for no other reason than their bigoted religious beliefs be sued? True, a business has the right to serve whoever they want to serve; and in Maryland, special provisions were put in place guaranteeing that this sort of thing wouldn’t happen. And frankly, we gays should boycott businesses that are not GLBT-friendly. However, at the risk of evoking an overused trope, there was also a time when it was acceptable for businesses to refuse to serve black patrons. As time went on, those businesses were pressured into change not by the government but by public opinion that came to view such behavior as prejudiced.

I say this a lot, but there is no reason other than homophobia bolstered by religious dogma for the GLBT community to be treated differently than the rest of hetero land. Their “scientific” studies are being discredited left and right. The medical and psychological communities haven’t been able to find anything wrong with gays. At what point do we just say “Enough!” to these people? We hear their fear, but we’re doing nobody a service by accommodating this nonsense.

Religious liberty ends where it senselessly tramples on the civil rights and liberties of citizens, and stands in the way of the inalienable Rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

002. Definitions

Okay.

Before this goes any further, I think we need to establish a common vocabulary:

ho·mo·sex·u·al
adj.   Of, relating to, or having a sexual orientation to persons of the same sex.

gay
Can be used either as an adjective to refer to or anything regarding those attracted to the same sex, or as a noun chiefly for homosexual men. Lesbian is typically used to refer to homosexual women. Is often used synonymously with “homosexual” but tends to be more loaded, carrying associations with the GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex) community and political and social activism.

queer
adj.  Used in reference to the LGBT communities as well as those perceived to be members of those communities. Originally it was a derisive term but has since been claimed as an identifier by many in the gay community.

For my own purposes, I’ve chosen to go with “same-sex attracted” or “homosexual.” It’s more clinical-sounding but accurate. If we’ve had this discussion, I feel comfortable saying that I’m gay because you know what I mean, and more importantly what I don’t mean. If you were to ask me right out if I’m gay, I’d probably respond, “I’m attracted to men, yes, but I don’t identify with the gay community as it currently exists.”

So now that we got that over with…