Sir Noel Malcolm concludes his lecture series with a discussion of gay life in the Age of Enlightenment (broadly speaking, 1660-1800), including the differences between Mediterranean cultures and northern European societies.
From the video description:
In this lecture, Sir Noel Malcom makes the case that there was not a sudden surge in homosexuality after The Enlightenment, instead it was a continuation of practises which had always existed. Historians should consider the history of Europe and sexual exploration outside of Florence, as the focus on this area to the determent of others has led to many having been misled.
The book upon which these lectures are based, Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750, is available at all major online booksellers.
Sir Noel Malcolm is a British historian and author, known for his work in early modern history and the relationship between Europe and the Islamic world. He is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and has written extensively on Thomas Hobbes, among other subjects. Knighted in 2014, he's also a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature.
In the third of his four lectures on the history of homosexuality in early modern Europe, Sir Noel Malcolm eludcidates the very different patterns of male-male sexual behavior between Southern Europe and Northern Europe. He also examines the camp behaviors and cross-dressing that occurred in the "molly houses" (somewhat equivalent to gay bars) in early 1700s England.
Along the way, he demolishes the pernicious assertion of Michel Foucault and other writers that "homosexuals" by whatever name they were called simply did not exist in the pre-modern era. Of course they did. We have always been part of the human race, a natural variation, just as in the animal kingdom. See my recommended reading list under Sir Noel's first lecture here.
Sir Noel is soft-spoken, so when I watched it, I turned up the volume, slowed the playback speed to 85%, and turned on the captions - which, however, are often ludicrous when he is quoting a foreign phrase. I'll be posting the rest of the series once a week.
You can see last week's episode here, along with my recommended reading list in gay history.
Last fall, as I reported on this blog, for a moment it seemed that Pope Francis was smiling on same-sex unions; but I was mistaken. Today the Pope signed off on a Vatican declaration that even in a committed union, homosex is a SIN, and since "God cannot bless sin," neither can the Church. Excerpt:
It is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage (i.e., outside the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life), as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex. . . . [Blessing such unions] would constitute a certain imitation or analogue of the nuptial blessing invoked on the man and woman united in the sacrament of Matrimony, while in fact “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family”.
[This teaching] declares illicit any form of blessing that tends to acknowledge their unions as such. In this case, in fact, the blessing would manifest not the intention to entrust such individual persons to the protection and help of God, in the sense mentioned above, but to approve and encourage a choice and a way of life that cannot be recognized as objectively ordered to the revealed plans of God.
What pompous bullshit. Since I'm an Episcopalian (lapsed), not a Catholic, this slanderous ruling has no direct relevance to me - but of course it reflects and encourages the same thinking in all other churches that hold to this antediluvian view of life and love. When it comes to the gays, that is. When it's about the straight boys and their spermatic proclivities, oh well, there's all kinds of loopholes, winks, and nudges, aren't there?
The truth is, there is nothing glorious, notorious, or ridiculous about homosexuality, which has occurred naturally and spontaneously throughout human and animal populations since the dawn of recorded history. I have no desire to change anybody's church; I just want to be left alone, neither glorified nor vilified nor ridiculed. And I insist upon the right to the equal protection of the laws, with the same human rights and dignity as anyone else.
This is not too much to ask; nor will it cause the world or the universe to collapse, despite hysterical religious claims to the contrary. You straight people have already done more than enough, collectively, down through the centuries to merit the wrath of God, if it comes to that, so quit trying to shift your guilt onto the gay scapegoats.
[A lot of boring pontification omitted here.]
As for Pope Francis, I still respect him as a kindly, magnanimous leader who is doing what good he can for the world in other ways - but I now unsay my remark in that earlier post about considering him a gay ally.
While making my coffee this morning, I looked out the window at the cars zooming by on the busy boulevard - from a distance, they are not so much different from those of fifty years ago. Traffic lights still wink red and yellow and green, just as they did then. Little birds flit among the trees, and nimble squirrels jog along the fence top just as their long-ago ancestors were wont to do. The sun shines just as brightly now as in the past, the sky is just as blue, and puffy white clouds still float along in their insouciant way. The grass and the trees are just as green, the cheerful zinnias and flaming crepe myrtles still as delightful to the eye as ever they were.
Inside our humble bungalow, long since remodeled countless times by who knows how many previous tenants, the potted plants in the windows, the plastered walls, the simple furniture, the striped blue-green-gold tablecloth and old-fashioned china, the kitchen shelves full of pots and pans and dishes and canned goods, are none of them very different from what might have been here fifty years ago. It doesn't look at all like the Jetsons' home. A time traveler suddenly popping in from a half-century ago would no doubt be quite unimpressed - apart from the microwave, the computers, and the big flat-screen TV, he would surely think there was really nothing to write home about. How disappointing!
And yet despite the seeming similitude, all is changed, and changed utterly.
The other day, M. P. told me at breakfast that he had just seen an online ad by Michael's, the nationwide arts-and-crafts chain, announcing their Pride Month sales. And we were both struck for a moment with awe and wonder at how very much things have changed for gay people just in our lifetimes. Now, at least with some retailers, gayness has joined the pantheon of other commercialized holidays, in the good old American tradition, along with Mother's Day, Father's Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. What a breathtaking development.
I understand that certain weenie-whiny children of the snowflake generation decry the evils of "corporate sponsorship," but it cannot be doubted that when Wal-Mart decks its shelves with all sorts of rainbow merchandise, gayness has arrived, it is part of the mainstream of American life, along with apple pie, baseball, Budweiser, and Twitter, like it or not. (And some don't like it a bit, but I'll get to that presently.)
The petulant Eloi of the modern world, college age and younger, have no memory of the 20th century - they have no real idea of what it was like to live before Stonewall, before gay bars, before AIDS, before gay books and newspapers and magazines and soccer clubs and churches and websites (and free porn 24/7), and all the social media hookups anyone could want, and even marriage - all those out-and-proud things that were simply unimaginable fifty years ago. Unimaginable, do you hear me, children? Pure fantasy - things that if we thought of them, we would immediately also think, "Oh, that will never happen."
But it did, every bit of it. And it's still happening, as each successive generation takes things a bit further. Now there is even - will wonders never cease? - a gay presidential candidate who is taken quite seriously, at least by the Democratic Party. Utterly unimaginable in 1969 - and for quite a long time afterwards, too.
Because, of course, it usually takes time for big changes to seep from the culture-churns of the Blue Coasts down into all the hills and valleys, nooks and crannies of the Big Red Middle. In some ways, I think it is still as true today as it was fifty years ago that people in New York and Los Angeles are living in a future that will not arrive in the far provinces until five or ten years from now - though the ubiquity of television, internet, and smart phones certainly hastens the process, especially among the young hipsters in every part of the country.
But then, impatient youth in every era, in every century, has always yearned for the limpid, dreamy future to arrive as quickly as possible, while age, weary and wizened, yearns for the comforts and certainties of a vanished past. It's human nature. We want what we don't have. And all too often, we don't miss what we do have until we lose it.
This fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots brings up a number of reflections I will share with my truckbuddies over the next few days. Having been under the weather with one little ailment or another the last couple of months, I just don't have the oomph to type it all out in one sitting. And of course I would enjoy hearing your comments on this momentous anniversary, too.
Just to jog your memory of prehistoric times, you can watch The Boys in the Band, written just before Stonewall - when "gay rights" were as yet completely unthought-of by most people. When I saw it again a year or so ago, I was startled to realize which character I most identified with, from the fuller perspective of maturity. What about you?
Cheat sheet - the cast and characters
Kenneth Nelson as Michael (the host)
Frederick Combs as Donald (Michael's best friend)
Leonard Frey as Harold (the guest of honor)
Cliff Gorman as Emory (Oh Mary, don't ask!)
Laurence Luckinbill as Hank (divorced guy)
Keith Prentice as Larry (Hank's lover)
Robert La Tourneaux as Cowboy Tex
Reuben Greene as Bernard (black guy)
Peter White as Alan McCarthy (straight guy - ?)
I'm sure my truckbuddies have already seen this story elsewhere, but I'm reprinting it for the record here in the BT. Juan Carlos Cruz, a survivor of sexual abuse by a Chilean priest, has reported that during a three-hour talk with Pope Francis last month, the Pope apologized to him in the name of the Church and told him:
Juan Carlos, that you are gay does not matter. God made you like this and loves you like this and I don’t care. The pope loves you like this. You have to be happy with who you are.
This does not mean a change in official Catholic teaching, but coming from the head man's lips, it's pretty amazing.
Cruz, who lives and works in Philadelphia, spoke with CNN's Chris Cuomo this week:
Sixty percent of Americans now support same-sex marriage, as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on its constitutionality next month. This is up from 55% last year and is the highest Gallup has found on the question since it was first asked in 1996.
Though same-sex marriage continues to be politically divisive, support for its legal status has reached new highs among Americans of all political stripes -- with Democrats at 76% support, independents at 64% and Republicans at 37%.
Last month, Gallup estimated that about 780,000 Americans are in same-sex marriages.
In addition to their changing views on the origins of being gay or lesbian, Americans' views on the morality of same-sex relations have also shifted in recent years. Currently, a record-high 63% of Americans describe gay or lesbian relations as "morally acceptable." That became the majority view in 2010. Only a decade ago, a majority thought same-sex relations were morally wrong.
Since 2001, increasing percentages of both Republicans and Democrats say gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable, though Democrats continue to be much more likely to express that view. Notably, for the first time, a majority of Republicans believe that same-sex relations are morally acceptable. Democrats crossed the majority threshold more than a decade ago.
The Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C., a nonpartisan outfit, has released the results of surveys taken in various countries, answering the question, "Should homosexuality be accepted by society?" And here you go - click to enlarge:
Note: this map omits the twenty or so countries that do offer same-sex civil unions, domestic partnerships, civil partnerships, etc., which may or may not provide substantial marriage-like rights and protections to same-sex couples.
It was too much to hope that after the white smoke rose and the TV anchors began nervously filling time and the cameras lingered for what seemed an eternity on that balcony over St. Peter’s Square, the man who stepped onto it would be someone open to revisiting the most archaic, obsolete matters of Roman Catholic doctrine. The group electing him was assembled by the last two popes, both conservatives. Its choice was bound to be more carbon copy than new page.
But it’s not too much to hope that the man who did appear there — and who has lived a willfully humble material existence until now, and took the name of the poor’s patron saint — will change the church’s emphasis. That’s the great opportunity before Pope Francis, whose biography and style make him an ideal candidate to point the church toward a new conversation and a better focus for its spiritual energies. To have it dwell less in the bedroom, more in the soup kitchen.
It’s time for the church to stop talking so much about sex. It’s the perfect time, in fact.
It’s on matters of sexual morality that the church has lost much of its authority. And it’s on matters of sexual morality that it largely wastes its breath. By insisting on mandatory celibacy for a priesthood winnowed and sometimes warped by that, by opposing the use of contraceptives for birth control, by casting judgment on homosexuals and by decrying divorce while running something of an annulment mill, the church’s leaders have enraged and alienated Catholics whose common sense and whose experience of the real world tell them that none of that is wise, kind or necessary.
First, have a look at an amusing interview with the creators of the "Shit Girls Say" videos, now a forthcoming book:
You notice one of the guys in there says "As gays, we identify with women." Which got your Head Trucker to thinking.
That's something I might have said when I was young - as a kid, it was the heroines of books and movies I tended to identify with, rather than the heroes - though with some exceptions.
Now, I would never say that. I strongly dis-identify with women, especially the weak, manipulative, self-centered, whiny types that the guys satirize so well in their videos.
Though many of my interests and inclinations might be typified as traditionally feminine ones: without delving into a tedious recital of examples, I'll just speak very broadly and say I incline more to the humanities and arts than to the sciences and technology, more to words than to numbers, more to domestic life than the business world.
On the other hand, as years have gone by I have come to admire more and more the traditional masculine virtues of being steady and strong, decisive and none too talkative. A personality that is calm, cool, capable, self-controlled, and rational is very attractive. Though of course the downside of that is being an ignorant, arrogant asshole. Boring too.
However, I am not sure I measure up very well on that yardstick of positive masculine traits. At this late age, I would rather have developed more of those traits, and more deeply, than I perhaps did.
Which makes me wonder: is our admiration as gay guys for one sex or the other - I'm not talking about sexual attraction, mind you, just personality types - something that changes as we get older? Or not.
I can tell you that I have always felt that as a personality, a soul, I am something different from both men and women - again to clarify, I am not talking about "gender identity" and transsexual issues here, not at all - I like my penis just fine, thank you - but being a gay man, when I consider the sum of all my talents and abilities and interests and inclinations, I just feel like - a third sex. Not one or the other but something else, sui generis: a different kind of soul, combining elements of both male and female. Can you relate?
My best bud M.P. and I have talked about this stuff and we agreed that gay men are nearly all actuated by a passion for beauty: creating, developing, nurturing, expressing, or transmitting it. Yet to that feminine love of beauty, we add a large admixture of masculine energy. Which makes us both like straight men and women, and yet at the same time unlike them too.
Be interested to hear what the rest of you fellas think about this topic, which I may not have expressed too well here, but maybe you get the gist of what I'm trying to say.
Another short video by independent filmmaker Ryan James Yezak in support of the documentary he is working on, Second Class Citizens: click here to support the project with a $1 or $5 contribution.
Frankly, I admire the concept but I find the tone too strident and the speakers too limited to one age group. What do you think about it, guys?
Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) by Salvador Dali, 1954
Today I just had to swipe the painting - one of my great favorites - and this excerpt from Andrew Sullivan - also one of my great favorites, I guess you boys know - because both are so fitting, so apt, for where I am now:
Christianity is in crisis - and in a deeper crisis, in my view, than many Christians are allowing themselves to believe. I start from a simple premise. There can be no conflict between faith and truth. If what we believe in is not true, it is worth nothing. The idea that one should insincerely support religious faith because it is good for others or for society is, for me, a profound blasphemy if you do not share the faith yourself. I respect atheists and agnostics who reject faith; I find it harder to respect fundamentalists - of total papal or Biblical authority - because of the blindness of their sincerity; but I have no respect for those who cynically praise religion for its social uses, while believing in none of it themselves. . . .
No educated Christian today can deny that the scriptures we have - copies of translations of copies of copies of oral histories - are internally and collectively inconsistent, written by many authors, constructed in specific historical contexts, reflecting human biases, and supplemented by several other gospels that at the time claimed just as much authority as those gospels eventually selected by flawed men centuries later. Anyone who believes that the Holy Spirit automatically guides every church leader to the perfect truth at all times need only look at the current hierarchy to be disabused of such childish wish-fulfillment; or cast an eye on church history for more than a few minutes.
So the solid architecture of the faith we inherited has been exposed more thoroughly in the last few decades than ever before. There is no single authoritative text, written by one God, word for word true. There is a much more complicated series of writings designed by many men, doubtless under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, that help us see some form of the figure Jesus through languages and texts and memories. I think the character and message of Jesus are searingly clear and distinctive even taking into account that daunting veil through which we are asked to see. But we can only begin to see this once we have understood the veil that both obstructs and made possible our view.
The same, I think, is true of the papacy as an alternative to Biblical literalism. This is in some ways a more durable defense against logos than Biblical literalism, but it is just another form of fundamentalism, deploying total obedience to total authority as an alternative to a living faith that can both doubt and yet also practice the love of God and one's enemies, Jesus's core instructions. I do not see how the limits and flaws of such total authoritarianism could have been more thoroughly illuminated than in the recent sex abuse scandal. When the man whose authority rests on being the vicar of Christ on earth consigns children to rape rather than tarnish the image of the church, he simply has no moral authority left. Yes, his position deserves respect. But its claims to absolute authority have fallen prey to the human arc of what Lord Acton called "absolute corruption".
So we are left in search of this Jesus with a fast-burning candle in a constantly receding cave where we know that at some point, the darkness will envelop us entirely. We will catch Him at times; He will elude us at others. We will have to listen to many words he may have spoken before we can each discern the words he may have meant; we will have to keep our eyes and ears open for science's revelations about the world, while understanding that science is just one way of understanding the world and that poetry, history, and practical perspectives have things to tell us as well. The cathedral at Chartres; the long story of Christian debate and theology; the rituals and daily practices that help us stay trained to intuit the divine we cannot understand and the divine we do not always see in every face around us: these too tell us things that go beyond fact, archeology and hermeneutics.
Yes, this intellectual sifting is hard and troubling to faith; yes, it may end with more mystery than clarity. But if our faith is to be true, it must rest on something more than denial of reality. It must rest on being the greatest experience of reality.
I would add only this, and I think Sullivan would agree: the fact that in every age and every clime, in every culture and society, a certain percentage of people are born gay instead of straight; that it is not an illness, a mental disorder, a perversion, or a choice; that it is not the result of demonic influence or bad parenting; that it is as much a wholesome variety of nature, of the universe, as a red rose or a yellow one; that gay people are fully as capable of love and devotion, of self-sacrifice and service to the greater good as any straight person is; all this is part of reality also, which faith to be worthy of belief must acknowledge and value as it values all that is truly human.
Jesus - truly God and truly man - knows the reality of all things, and is reality, the ultimate fusion of spirit and flesh, divine and terrestrial, mortal and immortal, all that is or was or can be. Take it as theology or philosophy or poetry: this I believe.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu has written an editorial for the Washington Post, condemning the wave of anti-gay legislation and violence in Africa. An excerpt:
Hate has no place in the house of God. No one should be excluded from our love, our compassion or our concern because of race or gender, faith or ethnicity -- or because of their sexual orientation. Nor should anyone be excluded from health care on any of these grounds. In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights. We knew this was wrong. Thankfully, the world supported us in our struggle for freedom and dignity.
It is time to stand up against another wrong. . . .
That this pandering to intolerance is being done by politicians looking for scapegoats for their failures is not surprising. But it is a great wrong. An even larger offense is that it is being done in the name of God. Show me where Christ said "Love thy fellow man, except for the gay ones." Gay people, too, are made in my God's image. I would never worship a homophobic God.
"But they are sinners," I can hear the preachers and politicians say. "They are choosing a life of sin for which they must be punished." My scientist and medical friends have shared with me a reality that so many gay people have confirmed, I now know it in my heart to be true. No one chooses to be gay. Sexual orientation, like skin color, is another feature of our diversity as a human family. Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people? Does God love his dark- or his light-skinned children less? The brave more than the timid? And does any of us know the mind of God so well that we can decide for him who is included, and who is excluded, from the circle of his love?
The wave of hate must stop. Politicians who profit from exploiting this hate, from fanning it, must not be tempted by this easy way to profit from fear and misunderstanding. And my fellow clerics, of all faiths, must stand up for the principles of universal dignity and fellowship. Exclusion is never the way forward on our shared paths to freedom and justice.
Vielpunkt and Z, gay Humboldt penguins at the Bremerhaven Zoo in Germany.
Ran across this feature in Esquire about gay life in the animal world, including rams, swans, bonobos, macaques, dolphins, whales, and koalas. Pretty cool, check it out.
From The Advocate via Joe.My.God: the 1967 CBS Reports: The Homosexuals.
Homo = pervert = sick = dirty = disgusting = miserable = doomed: this was the world I grew up in and remember so vividly. The attitudes and prejudice and total condemnation that drove a lot of guys to suicide, and deeply wounded those of us who survived - wounds that still hurt and still deeply affect our lives all these years later.
I didn't see this show when it was first broadcast, and that's probably a good thing, but I do have a memory from just a couple of years later that I want to share with you.
When my father died unexpectedly in my junior year of high school, an older lady I'd never met before, some friend of the family, started a conversation with me at the viewing. She pulled a photograph out of her purse and said, "This is my grandson, we just buried him a few months ago. He killed himself with a shotgun in his car one night. Look at his picture: he was such a handsome young man, smart, athletic, popular. I just can't understand why he would do a thing like that. Can you?" I suppose because I was nearly the same age as her grandson, she perhaps hoped I would have some younger-generation insight into this unfathomable mystery that obviously grieved her deeply.
I looked at the photo, his senior portrait: yes, a smiling, goodlooking guy with wavy blondish hair, neatly dressed in sport jacket and tie, the kind of guy who might have been elected class president or won a scholarship to an Ivy League school. The kind of guy who would have been popular in school, who could have had lots of friends, and plenty of girls lined up to date him. I had to tell her no, I couldn't understand it, either.
But years later, I remembered: and it flashed on me. What if he was gay? And then it all made sense: the fatal sense of guilt, the inward shame, the disgust with one's self, the need to hide and pretend, the unanswered prayers, the hopelessness. The knowing that you would never be what everyone thought, what everyone expected you to be. The despair. The unremitting pain. The one way out.
There was no hope for small-town guys back then. Do watch this and learn just what the world was like for us gays not so long ago, just in my lifetime; and notice that some straight people's minds have not moved one inch forward in the forty-three years since then.
Some quotes from Mike Wallace:
“The average homosexual, if there be such, isn’t interested in or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. His life, his love life, consists of series of chance encounters in the clubs and bars he inhabits, and on the streets.”
“Homosexuality is, in fact, a mental illness.”
“The church has a great deal of sympathy for those who are handicapped in this way.”
“[Being a homosexual] automatically rules out that [the man in question] will remain happy.”
The men (no mention of lesbians is ever made) who aren’t on camera as representatives of fledgling gay rights groups at the time, like the Mattachine Society, are interviewed in shadow or behind plants, and say things like, “I know I’m sick inside . . . immature.” And then comes the segment on a 1955 homosexual witch hunt in Boise, Idaho, one that apparently turned the whole town upside down with fear and paranoia, with a close-up of an op-ed piece in the Boise newspaper titled “Crush the Monster.”
On a related note: here's a trailer for the 2006 documentary The Fall of '55, about the Boise witch hunt:
I used to have a certain admiration for the late Pope John Paul II as an indefatigable supporter of human rights in general, notwithstanding his also obvious support for the Catholic moral position on matters of sexuality.
But I can never forget the cold and cutting pronouncement he made in his last book, Memory and Identity, reported in the news media just a week or two after my husband's death, that same-sex marriage was an "ideology of evil." Yes, two men and a little dog living quietly and peacefully in a little town far out on the prairie, working their jobs, serving the community, paying their taxes, attending church, buying groceries, doing all the very same things their neighbors did, day in and day out, were "objectively disordered" and "intrinsically evil," points he had already made in a letter to American bishops twenty years earlier.
But now with my husband barely cold in the ground, I felt His Holiness's nasty, coldhearted, evil-minded words more acutely than ever before. This was a man, it must be recalled, in a position of ultimate moral authority over more than a billion people; and for all his great intellect and wide experience, the best he could say about Cody and me is that we were evil, and promoting evil. Really.
whipped himself with a belt, even on vacation, and slept on the floor as acts of penitence and to bring him closer to Christian perfection, according to a new book by the Polish prelate spearheading his sainthood case...
"It's an instrument of Christian perfection," Oder said, responding to questions about how such a practice could be condoned considering Catholic teaching holds that the human body is a gift from God.
"As some members of his close entourage in Poland and in the Vatican were able to hear with their own ears, John Paul flagellated himself. In his armoire, amid all the vestments and hanging on a hanger, was a belt which he used as a whip and which he always brought to Castel Gandolfo," the papal retreat where John Paul vacationed each summer.
Sullivan, a devout Catholic, approves, saying
I have every respect for the practice of self-mortification and self-denial. . . . I see the last Pope's embrace of these things as affecting signs of his deep and genuine closeness to God.
Yet despite his loyal support for self-flagellation - a practice which Jesus never indulged in, and never, ever recommended - that brilliant mind also has the independence to ask the pertinent question here:
So why is self-abuse inherently wrong when it is done by hand and yet saintly when it is done by whip?
Masturbation, of course, is also an "intrinsically and gravely disordered action," the Church says.
So - if you jack yourself off, or you get off with your committed partner, you are committing outrageous evil. And destroying civilization while you're at it. Don't even think about asking for the law to protect your love and marriage, you filthy, twisted, disordered creep, you.
But - if you whip yourself bloody in your bedroom every night, why, God smiles - and loves you even more.
Now I ask you, fellas: Just how fucked up is that?
Christian perfection, my ass.
And again I refer my truckbuddies to Matthew 25 for clarification.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, harmony; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
and welcome to the Blue Truck, a blog for mature gay men with news and views on gay rights, history, art, humor, and whatever comes to mind. Plus a few hot men. The truck's all washed and gassed up, so hop in buddy, let's go.
CAUTION: For mature gay men only beyond this point. Some posts and links may not be suitable for children or the unco guid. You have been warned.
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My Story
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Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God.
Note, 9/15/26: For the past week, Blogger has not updated most of the posts in this sidebar. I don't know what to do about it. You can still access the websites below by clicking on the titles of each one.
