Agnus Dei

Good Friday

My only Lenten offering this year.  And my favorite classical piece, which will be played one day at my funeral.  Some of you know it as the Adagio for Strings.

Peace to you all.

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Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace.

Unexpected Meeting

Maundy Thursday

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.

My religious history is a long and winding road, from my christening at the age of six months down till now:  a story much too tedious to relate in one sitting, and of no use or interest to anyone but me.  Nor has it been a casual stroll down a blossom-covered lane; rather, times without number it has seemed a stony, uphill path leading only to Calvary.  As C. S. Lewis phrased it, I have "learned my driving in a hard school"; though whether anything I have learned can be of the slightest help to anyone else, I cannot possibly say.  I can only share and relate what has happened in this obscure life of mine, for whatever it may be worth to anyone else, and that is probably not much.

And I can speak only in Christian terms, because that is the only religious grammar and vocabulary I know.  Though I have come to realize at this late age that God is bigger than the Church, and bigger than the Bible; inconceivably bigger than we can comprehend:  a mystery, a joy, a boundless love at the heart of things I can in no way define but merely affirm.

Tonight I will share with you my Maundy Thursday story; and all I can do is tell it, not explain it. 

Continued after the jump . . .

Mixner Says "Enough!"

An excerpt from David Mixner, now marking 50 years of activism for civil rights, who has these trenchant observations on President Obama and LGBT rights - emphasis in the original:

How bad is the situation? Really bad. We are not anywhere near there yet. By any stretch of the imagination. . . .

For the last year, over and over again in the blogsphere, we have written about how 2009 was our year. We understood never again would we have the kind of margin the Democrats had in Congress in the future, that it wasn't an election year and that the time to act was then. The Obama team, and yes HRC, told us to wait; that they had a grand plan and everything would take place in time.

Well the time is over for poetic words and empty promises. Our patience has run out. If HRC has a master plan and time schedule, we at this stage, have a right to know what it is and what the Obama team promised them last year. Simply put, enough of these political games and giving our friends permission to take detours, prolong the trip and deny us our freedom.

As our president memorably said a while ago, "Enough." Really and seriously - enough.

Honk to AmericablogGay.

Hate Speech IS Free Speech

I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

--Voltaire

I have sworn upon the altar of Almighty God eternal hostility towards every form of tyranny over the mind of man.

--Jefferson

Attention, please:  the class will now come to order.  Take your seats and spit out that damn bubble gum. 

Time for a very elementary civics lesson, boys and girls:  freedom of speech means you are free to say what you think.  Whatever you think.

You are equally free, then, to say out loud and in public that you approve of something, and equally free to say that you disapprove of something. 

If your approval extends all the way to love of something, it's okay, you can say that.  And if your disapproval extends all the way to hatred of something, that's okay too, you can say that as well.

It does not matter whether anyone else agrees with your approval/love or with your disapproval/hate.  It does not matter whether your stated opinion is fashionable or unfashionable with any particular group.  It does not even matter whether you are right or wrong.

Freedom of speech means you are free to say whatever you think.  Even if what you think offends someone else's idea of what is right or wrong.

Because freedom of speech - which of course includes not merely oral utterances but also any form of written utterance as well, and even silent demonstrations of opinion - is another facet of an even larger, more important concept that we call freedom of belief, aka freedom of conscience.

A free man, or woman, - unlike a slave - has the inalienable right to think whatever he pleases, believe whatever he pleases, and express whatever he pleases.  Is that point very clear?  Free people can think and say whatever they want.  Slaves and prisoners and children cannot.

Which is why totalitarian regimes always clamp down first on freedom of expression; once that is taken away, the process of converting people to slaves of the State is halfway done.

Continued after the jump . . .

Another Year, Another Spring

What's left of the vegetable garden that the ex-roommate and I planted last year.  Tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, bell peppers, squash, and okra, a bedroom-size plot and a white picket fence - it was a lovely hope.  But all it ever produced was a single handful of stunted tomatoes, not enough to feed two people. 

Sometimes despite all your tender care, and plenty of sun and water and good soil - things just won't grow, or they wither on the vine.  No good reason - they just do.  So you let it all go back to grass, and move on.

Finally, There's a Word for It

Swiped verbatim from Joe.My.God.:

"Mantique" - An attractive gay man over the age of 50. From the Queers United "word of the gay" series.

The Straight Politician's Guide to Managing Your Gay Crisis

Brian Safi nails the gay crisis sweeping through straight Republican circles.  Chuckle.

Keeping Up with the Bonobos

And the albatresbians.  The New York Times Magazine features a thoughtful, well-written piece on "Can Animals Be Gay?" that you should read.  Excerpt:

Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as “exhalated belchlike sounds.” Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless — an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional. . . .

These ideas generally aim to explain only particular behaviors in a particular species. So far, the only real conclusion this relatively small body of literature seems to point to, collectively, is a kind of deflating, meta-conclusion: a single explanation of homosexual behavior in animals may not be possible, because thinking of “homosexual behavior in animals” as a single scientific subject might not make much sense. “Biologists want to build these unified theories to explain everything they see,” Vasey told me. So do journalists, he added — all people, really. “But none of this lends itself to a linear story. My take on it is that homosexual behavior is not a uniform phenomenon. Having one unifying body of theory that explains why it’s happening in all these different species might be a chimera.”

The point of heterosexual sex, Vasey said, no matter what kind of animal is doing it, is primarily reproduction. But that shouldn’t trick us into thinking that homosexual behavior has some equivalent, organizing purpose — that the two are tidy opposites. “All this homosexual behavior isn’t tied together by that sort of primary function,” Vasey said. Even what the same-sex animals are doing varies tremendously from species to species. But we’re quick to conceive of that great range of activities in the way it most handily tracks to our anthropomorphic point of view: put crassly, all those different animals just seem to be doing gay sex stuff with one another. As the biologist Marlene Zuk explains, we are hard-wired to read all animal behavior as “some version of the way people do things” and animals as “blurred, imperfect copies of humans.”

What I Say:  Your Head Trucker is mildly amused by the convoluted attempts of scientists and philosophers to fit homosex into some rigid, all-encompassing Grand Theory of Life; which to me seems just as silly and irrelevant as the fundamentalists trying to fit all the messy, multiform variety of the cosmos into the straitjacket of Biblical literalism.

Both attempts are very short-sighted and missing the point:  namely, that there is a divine and jovial mystery at the heart of things whose depths no one can plumb. 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

--Hamlet, Act I.

As I see it, one might as well try to explain why Australia is where it is and not, say, in the Gulf of Mexico.  Or why the sky is blue, or why stars twinkle but planets don't, or why we say the sun rises in the east when we could if we wanted to just as easily say it rises in the west.  Or why in certain cases the precise compound curve of a lip, a shoulder, a hip, or a buttock makes another person weak at the knees.

Very clever fellows have, indeed, long since come up with explanations for some of these things; but I submit that these delightful events would still be occurring and giving daily joy had no explanation ever been devised.  Explanation is not the same as justification; and some things need no justification at all.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty:  that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.

--Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn.

Thirty Years Later: Desire and Regret

Your Head Trucker about 1983, in the one short beardless period of my adult life.

I've been meaning to write a note about a significant milestone in my life.  I don't remember the exact day, but I know it was a Saturday night in February, 1980 - that's when I first had sex, at the very late age, so it seemed then, of 24.   (That fooling around I did with some other boys when I was 11 or 12 doesn't really count.)  I had missed out entirely on the Seventies, I am very sorry to say, all except for some Playgirl magazines and a lot of furtive whacking off - but that doesn't count either.

The previous fall I had finally worked up the courage to go to the gay rap group on campus and ease into the water, so to speak.  It's difficult, and amusing, to remember now how terrified I was of coming out, even just to other gay men.  But after a year on a large university campus I had taken those baby steps of connecting socially; and then after a few months of paddling around in the shallow end of the pool, it was time to try the diving board.

It was probably in January that I first went to the local gay bar, along with some friends from the campus group.  I would never have had the balls to walk in there all alone, I don't think.  Hell, I didn't even have a clue that there was a gay bar in town - that's how deep in the closet I was.  But as soon as we arrived, I was thrilled at the sight of all these guys - and some gals too, of course - dancing with each other.  Hot looking guys, like something out of my dreams; but who were also very ordinary, everyday guys in jeans and college T-shirts and ball caps:  not scary at all.  I don't know what I expected, but it was all very reassuring, and fun.

I don't remember if I even danced with anyone that first time; mainly I was just scoping out the scenery.  A few weekends later I went out with the guys again, still a bit shy and not expecting anything in particular to happen.  And that's when somebody introduced me to Greg, and suddenly - kersplash!

Continued after the jump . . .

The Nightly Bullshit Report

I'm sure a lot of people work very hard to produce television news programs.  But sometimes it does seem a whole lot like this, don't it.  Which is one reason why your Head Trucker doesn't have cable. 

Language NSFW.




Honk to my truckbuddy RPTRCUB who found this first.

Landmark Gay Weddings in Britain

It seems the United Kingdom is alive and well and operating in the 21st century.  So why aren't we?

This weekend, two high-profile civil partnerships were celebrated in that right little, tight little island.  Labour MP Chris Bryant, 48, currently Minister of State for Europe and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, tied the knot with his sweetheart Jared Cranney, a company secretary, in the first-ever gay union held in the Houses of Parliament.  Because it is still forbidden to hold gay weddings in British churches, the Parliamentary chapel of St. Mary - where straight MP's have been getting married since forever - was not used; instead, the ceremony took place in the House of Commons dining room, overlooking the Thames.

Bryant, who represents a district in South Wales, came in for a lot of criticism when a picture of him - posing in what some fashionistas deemed very unfashionable underpants - was discovered on Gaydar back in '03.  Nevertheless, his political career has continued very successfully.  Imagine that happening over here.

Also this weekend, as reported by The Independent:

One groom wore ceremonial uniform with his Iraq medal, the other morning dress with an orchid. Surrounded by silverware and paintings commemorating great battles, Lance Corporal James Wharton, 23, and his new husband enjoyed their first dance to Tina Turner in the warrant officers' mess of the most prestigious regiment in the land.

The Household Cavalry, famed for escorting the Queen during state occasions and the fact that it counts both her grandsons among its officers, celebrated its first gay wedding in style. L/Cpl Wharton was joined in a civil partnership with his boyfriend, the Virgin air steward Thom McCaffrey, 21, surrounded by members of L/Cpl Wharton's regiment, the Blues and Royals.

"The entire regiment has been really supportive," he said. "When I went to ask the Squadron Leader, Major Nana Twumasi-Ankrah, for permission to get married, he just said 'This is fantastic, congratulations'."

"The lads joked it was the gay event of the year. Everyone was excited. It was the talk of the barracks. This generation of soldiers is completely liberal," added the junior non-commissioned officer, whose only regret was that some of his friends would not be back from Afghanistan in time to enjoy the nuptials.

Just over 10 years ago, before a ban on homosexuality was lifted, gay soldiers faced interrogation and expulsion from the Army if discovered. But, in a very visible sign of the changing times, L/Cpl Wharton was given permission to host his wedding reception at the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment's Knightsbridge barracks.

Wharton was featured on the cover of the British Army's magazine Soldier last year.  The British military has been around for a millennium longer than the American army, and seems to be thriving - surely ours will too, when DADT is kicked into the dustbin of history.