For the Record

Unknown male couple from the late 1800's
seem to peer at us through the mists of time;
found at Antique Erotic.

Your Head Trucker just wants to say a thing or two for the benefit of any posterity who may read these lines, years distant from now. Not that I really expect anyone to do so; I write simply for my own pleasure, without trying to be any sort of noteworthy author - that I leave to the big dogs who have more ambition, more energy, and more finances than I do.

First, there was a country song popular about twenty years ago with a title and chorus of "one step forward and two steps back" - which certainly seems to describe the progress of equal rights for gays and the rest of the unpronounceable alphabet. While we are still basking in the happy glow of last month's Supreme Court rulings, it seems the antigay forces have quickened their step and gotten even more vicious and violent. Your Head Trucker is aware of the utterly horrible things that have been happening in recent days in Russia, Cameroon, Haiti, Jamaica, and in other parts of the world, and even in some of our own big cities. But for reasons of my own personal equanimity, I just don't have the heart to write about all that - the links to news stories in the sidebar will give you all the updates you fellas can stand on those terrible things.

Which just goes to show that merely gaining all the legal victories we deserve to establish our civil rights and equal dignity before the law does not mean that hate and contempt will melt away in a puff of green smoke, like the Wicked Witch of the West. A change in the laws does lead over time to greater acceptance by the majority of decent folks, perhaps, as happened in the formerly segregated South - but even now, fifty years after the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement, there remains among a certain percentage of the population - and not only in Dixie, mind you - a residuum of bigotry and disdain for blacks. As well as for women, Latinos, Asians, and all the other minorities you care to name.   The bitterness of hatred and resentment is such an addictive bone to chew: always tasty but never satisfying.

Rogers and Hammerstein wrote the famous song that says "you've got to be carefully taught" - to hate. But your Head Trucker wonders if they didn't get that backwards. It seems to me that fear, contempt, and hatred of the Other is the default attitude of human nature, perhaps an atavistic reaction to the presence of strangers not of "our tribe," and henceforth dangerous and not to be trusted: certainly not one of Us. In my view, it takes careful education and good upbringing - the achievement of an enlightened mind, which does not come without effort - to have a truly broad, tolerant outlook on humanity and its manifold variations.

Your Head Trucker is also aware, but likewise not minded to write about, the rash of lawsuits now breaking out across the country, seeking to overturn state marriage laws and constitutional amendments. Some of these seem premature and ill-advised to me, jumping the gun a bit, but I'm no lawyer, so I really can't say for sure. But I did note what one of the lawyers still trying to keep Prop 8 valid in California said the other day: something to the effect that liberals should be wary of state officials picking and choosing which laws they will defend, or exercising their individual judgment on constitutionality, because one day the tables may be turned, and it will be officials upholding some conservative measure against the will of the majority. Which is a point worth thinking about. There's a right and a wrong way to do everything, you know? But someone else can run with that ball, I just note my concern about sensible strategy and proper procedures for the record here.

But in any case, it will not do to think that because we have won a couple of great victories that the war is over, and only blue skies and pink clouds lie before us. Your Head Trucker recalls the case of the Jews in Europe, who were continually harassed, persecuted, and driven out of one country or another for the better part of two thousand years. Not until the French Revolution were Jews accorded civil rights in France and its territories, and fifty years or more later in the rest of Europe. All well and good.

But the deep roots of contempt and hatred - as deep and ancient in Christendom as those against homosexuals - remained, though the trunk and branches had been lopped off by law. And then it all burst out again, magnified and barbaric, in the Holocaust. Who can say that such a thing can never happen to the gay community? History takes strange turnings and windings as mankind lurches and stumbles along. Many nations in Africa and in what used to be called the Soviet Bloc are already unleashing a sort of gay Holocaust, it seems - spurred on by the devilish propaganda of American evangelists.

Don't think it can never happen here. Anything can happen, anywhere, anytime, under the right conditions. But as your Head Trucker will likely have been gathered to his ancestors by that time, if ever it does happen, he leaves the question to be considered by another generation.

But one thing is certain, and that is the continuing responsibility to do as you would be done by, which is incumbent upon all civilized people. This is what it means to be fully human, exercising freedom in accordance with reason and with brotherly love; to do less is to sink to the level of the beasts, a waste of the human potential for good.

Liberty is a fine thing, but it is not license. Freedom is not permission to run wild and say or do anything that pops into your head without considering the consequences for yourself and others: that is merely puerile ego let loose, and is unworthy of civilized men and women.

Apart from the moral considerations, it is also eminently practical - because of course, what goes around comes around, and that is just as true for the gays, individually and collectively, as it is for everybody else. For one thing, violence in any form is completely unacceptable: there was an incident a week or two ago at the Pride parade in Seattle, I think it was, where a group of lesbians for some reason beat a lone antigay protestor (a man) to the ground - I saw a short clip of it, and it seemed that he was just holding a sign and was attacked by the women, not the other way around.

I haven't followed up on the story, but not only is it revolting to witness public violence, started by whichever side, but it's also very stupid: we gays are only 3 or 4 percent of the population, and 99 percent of us have probably never been in any kind of fight since kindergarten. What do you think the repercussions would be on individual gays around the country if the lower sort of bigots got the idea that we were prone to violence? We are already seeing a surge in the number of antigay assaults and beatings and hate crimes around the country - if we start beating up on people, it will only add gasoline to the flames. A very, very stupid idea.

For another thing, in his final remarks in the House of Lords over the eminent, unstoppable passage of the same-sex marriage bill last week, Conservative peer Lord Cormack - the very picture of an English gentleman - made a rather moving plea against a spirit of triumphalism among the gays - which Baroness Barker, a lesbian and Liberal Democrat, agreed would be highly inappropriate, although the happiness of the event was something to be celebrated. This courtly exchange is wisdom, for those who have ears to hear.

And for the record, your Head Trucker wants to say that some of the well-known gay bloggers and perennial "spokesmen" for gay rights who are often seen on TV or quoted in print simply do not represent me. I could give a long, long list of examples here, but I think just one will suffice: this week, the articulate but foul-mouthed and arrogant Dan Savage, on the Bill Maher show, during an exchange about marriage and procreation, said the biological arguments were irrelevant to him, for he was going to "keep on inseminating my boyfriend and hope for the best" - i.e., a baby. Which visibly shocked one of the conservative panelists. This sort of deliberate rudeness does not win us any friends; it just feeds their loathing for the "filthy queers." And this kind of prickish disrespect of opponents, even when they are in the wrong, will not escape a payback in the scheme of things. Again, a word to the wise is sufficient.

Finally, I just want to say, when future generations try to penetrate the great cloud of chatter and squawking and theorizing and bitching that envelops all questions of gay rights like a thick fog, that what the big-city folks and the hipsters and the radicals and the cool people, and all their ilk, have to say is, a great deal of it, irrelevant to me. What I am all about is very simple: My Story is linked in the sidebar, for those who care to know where I am coming from. And where I have always been headed is exemplified in the photograph at the top of this post: just the simple, homely fact of two men loving each other, happy together, unscorned, untrammeled, undespised. Which is to say, just the same sort of simple hope that every straight couple has for love and happiness and a quiet place in the sun.

That's all I really have to say, and all I ever really wanted. All the rest is just vanitas.  Life is so short in this cramped, confused, and often brutal world - in the end, love is all that really matters, and all that remains of us beyond the grave.