Questioner

I’m not quite certain how a gay anti-war secular humanist who dreams of living in a blue state ended up in a family of rabid pro-war Baptist NASCAR-watching Bush supporters, but I fear that somewhere there’s a family of leftist Unitarians wondering why their son spits and chews, speaks in tongues, and wants to kill anyone with darker skin who doesn’t accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

I survived Thanksgiving, though only because I exercised all the anger-management skills my therapy group has been working on. For three hours, I was told that it doesn’t matter that Bush lied. Saddam was behind 9/11 and we had to get him. The hurricanes are God’s warning to us that we need to stop gay marriage and teach intelligent design. Oh, and everyone in the family is firmly convinced that the reason I’ve stopped drinking and doing drugs is because I have AIDS.

Absolutely none of that is true, but there isn’t a soul in the family, including my nieces and nephews, who don’t accept all of that as Heaven-inspired Gospel. I really don’t want to believe that my family is typical of Southern Bush supporters, but it would certainly explain a lot of what is happening in America today.

I want to move to Canada. I’m not kidding. I want to move to Canada. Would some nice Canadian please, pretty-please, adopt me? Please? Even Stephen Harper and the Tories can’t be THIS bad!

Shudders of horror. Thanksgiving approaches. For those of you who are not American, Thanksgiving is a day in which most Americans travel great distances to see relatives with whom they will argue while eating prodigious amounts of food and watching the Detroit Lions and/or the Dallas Cowboys grunting Neanderthal-like on television. The greatest fear of my life is about to manifest itself. My entire family, the whole fam damily (as one of my relatives likes to say- see? It really is Hell), will be gathered under my mother’s roof.

When I was younger, such gatherings were ugly for me because there were always people asking me about my girlfriend or when I was going to get a girlfriend or why I didn’t have a girldfriend or wouldn’t a girlfriend be more satisfying than a boyfriend. It took several years for those questions to end. Now, it’s just political and religious discussions about how I am going to Hell because I voted for John Kerry and am not a Southern Baptist. Last year, I had to listen to rantings about how Bush had won the greatest mandate to govern in a century, (2%?), how gay marriage would be the downfall of America, and that Condi Rice would be OK as Secretary of State but that America was not ready for a nigger, (their word, NOT mine), in the White House.

In years past, I kept silent or went out to the backyard and smoked a joint. But, in recent years, I have begun to adopt one of the slogans of the old ACT-UP: “Silence is Death.”

I refuse to be silent any longer. I don’t intend to be obnoxious and argumentative this year, but there are three points on which I refuse to remain silent:

1. Bush Lied. Period.

2. There is no God, and if there is, he has a Hell of a lot to answer for!

3. My marrying another guy will NOT destroy the ability of what few heterosexuals there are who still want to get married to do so.

Oh, and by the way, for anyone who doesn’t remember the purpose of Thanksgiving, it’s to remind ourselves of the things for which we should be thankful. And, I couldn’t care less if Dallas wins or not. (Actually, that’s not true. They’re from Texas and any team from Texas MUST lose!)

And, I mean it! Happy Thanksgiving!

I was walking in the park today and was NOT wearing my Howard Dean sweatshirt, (I chose my Stanford sweatshirt, instead). Yet, I still found myself in a strange situation. There is a small monument to William Shakespeare in one section of the park, built in an art-deco style during the twenties. I was sitting on one of the benches connected to it when a young boy of about eight or nine walked past and stopped. He looked at the wrought iron sillouhettes of the characters from A Midsummer’s Night Dream and asked me who they were. I explained and then told him the story of the play. He was quite interested and I think we both enjoyed the discussion. That is until his mother came along. She gave what can only be described as a hateful, withering look, and took her son by the arm. Roughly dragging him away, I heard her say as she glanced back at me, “How many times have I told you not to talk to strange men!”

I understand the need to teach children vigilence and care in a world as dangerous as ours, but have we gone too far? Have we reached a point where children don’t trust anyone? And, if so, whose fault is it? Are there proportionally a greater number of sexual predators roaming around today than in the past, or does it just seem to be that way because local television news finds it easier to look up names on a sex offender registry and create a story than to actually make the effort to report real news? Is it because every cable news channel now devotes their prime time programming to the latest “missing pretty white woman.” or the latest abducted nine year-old?

Am I to feel suspect just by going outside? Should I feel guilty if I walk in a park alone? I’m not a sexual predator and I have no desire to attack every child I see. Should I be made to feel like one simply because I choose to take a walk by myself? Should any man walking alone automatically be considered a sex offender or predator?

Let’s be careful and let’s teach our children common sense, and before we do that, let’s try exercising some ourselves.

I have discussed in my previous posts that I chose as an adult to react to the sexual and physical abuse I survived as a child and adolescent by becoming self-destructive. For years, I drank, smoked pot, and spent my free time in an endless and fruitless search for love and/or sex. I no longer engage in any of these behaviors, but for years, I tried various spiritual programs to help free myself of the self-destruction. None worked.

I have done it on my own. It has been difficult. It has been painful. But, I am putting my life back together and I am doing so without resorting to wishful thinking and irrational beliefs. The truth is that I don’t believe in God and haven’t, despite all my attempts to “fake it ’til I made it.” As a teenager, I even considered going into the ministry, but realized the hypocrisy of trying to find God by bringing his message to others.

My first crisis of faith came at the age of six when I learned there was no Santa Claus. I asked my parents that if there was no Santa, how did I know there was a God? Their response was that I just had to believe there was. I don’t blame them, but this has basically been the response anyone I’ve asked about this has given for the last forty years. “We can’t tell you why; it just is.”

I need a bit more when I ask “Why?” than the simple reply “Because.”

Sunday afternoon was one of those fall afternoons that people read about in nostalgic novels about car rides in old Hudsons or LaSalles through New England. I needed a bowl of clam chowder and a mug of tomato soup. I went walking through the park and enjoyed the rain of red and orange leaves about me, the games of touch football I observed, and the bite of the chilly wind on my cheek. I also laughed at the taunting of the Bush supporter who laughed at me.

In digging through my closet for a sweatshirt to wear on my walk, I came across an old, (2003?), navy blue pullover with the words “Howard Dean for America” emblazoned across the front. I was feeling rather obnoxious and rebellious, so I decided to wear it. I should have expected something to happen, but not something as irrational as what did occur.

I was walking past a picnic when a man looked at me and spoke up. He had a goatee, not one of those sophisticated ones that wine experts wear, but the kind that in my state are usually worn by meth-addict construction workers and evangelical Christians. With a sort of Neaderthal chuckle, he pointed to my Howard Dean sweatshirt and declared, “We sure kicked his ass!”

I was curious and I had to ask, hoping against hope that the moron actually had a few working synapses. “Who kicked his ass?”

“Dubya!” the cretin replied proudly.

I walked on, realizing it was fruitless to point out to him that Dean was defeated in the race for the Democratic nomination and that it was John Kerry who lost by two points to “Dubya.” I doubt he would have understood anything I said. Now that the President’s approval ratings are down in the thirties, this, apparently, is what his support has been reduced to.

Can the country survive until 2008?

There’s been another school shooting here in America, this time in Tennessee; and, yet again, the conservatives are calling for a crackdown on school violence and tough penalties for these “miscreants.” But, I say that the conservatives are the ones responsible for the violence in the first place.

In every school, bullying is a major problem. It was a horrible problem when I was in junior high during the Vietnam era and it continues to be today. In almost every single one of these school shootings, the shooter was a victim of vicious and continuous bullying and the authorities in the school did little or nothing about it. It was true in my case. I was told that it was my own fault because I wouldn’t fight back. My principal told me that I asked for it. My coach in gym class said that if I wasn’t a sissy, I wouldn’t be bullied. Conservatives scream that when you try to understand that these kids are being bullied and that they snap, you are simply coddling them instead of understanding them; and we all know how much conservatives and “Christians” love punishment. It’s almost a fetish with them.

If I had had access to a gun in the eighth grade years ago, it is quite possible I could have been one of these boys. When the abuse, the beatings, the ridicule, the harrassment is continuous and the victim sees no hope for it ever to end, sometimes desperate and violent thoughts win out over reason.

Until we decide that bullying is not a rite of passage, that jocks and rich kids don’t have a constitutional right to abuse the unpopular and the weak, that coaches and administrators have to get up off their lazy government-employee, no-accountability asses and actually DO soemthing, until someone tells the conservatives to shut up and look at the causes instead of the effects, this problem will continue and it will get worse.

Nine years ago, during the autumn of 1996, I visited Washington, DC to see the AIDS Memorial Quilt displayed on the National Mall. It was an incredible and moving sight: tens of thousands of individual quilts memorialing friends and family-members who had succumbed to the disease. On that Sunday afternoon, I was sitting on a park bench taking a rest near the east end of the Mall, when a young woman carrying a petition asking Congress to appropriate more funds to research and fight HIV approached a young family. The mother’s response to her polite request was, “No thank you. We’re Chreestians.” They then quickly led their little children away from the heathen.

Years before, when I earned a living waiting tables, I found that I had to alter my speech when I approached certain tables. Accustomed to saying, “Good evening, my name is Jeff and I will be taking care of you this evening. May I bring you something to drink before you order?’ I found that often, since this is a city in the Bible Belt, I would often receive the smug and pious reply, “No thank you. We’re Chreestians.” I would proceed then to take their dinner order and when they added, “Oh, and I’ll have a coffee,” I would sometimes reply, “I thought you said you weren’t drinking anything.” My point in being obnoxious and unprofessional, aside from satisfying my need for revenge against the smug and pious, was that they didn’t need to throw some cloak of superiority over themselves. They could just as easily have ordered coffee or iced tea or Coke, just as 95% of the people who responded to that question did. However, they chose to announce to all around that they were “Chreestian” and, therefore, superior in their righteousness.

Over the last few years, when I have sought help with my recovery from the abuse of my youth and the self-destruction of my adulthood, I’ve been told that all I need to do is turn my life over to Christ and I will be just fine. And, then I have the memory of that family in Washington, DC who didn’t believe in helping relieve or end the suffering of people with AIDS because they, the family, were “Chreestians.” Or I am reminded of those many people who announced to the entire restaurant that they didn’t drink because they were “Chreestian.”

It must be the same mentality that leads Pat Robertson to declare that Dover, Pennsylvania will receive the violent wrath of God because they removed the eight school board members who wanted to teach religion in their science classes.

Oh, God, save me from your followers.

My psychiatrist has just diagnosed me as suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and I think that a major reason for it is that I spent a good part of my adolescence listening to The Carpenters and Barry Manilow. OK. I’m probably exaggerating a little, but I was slightly different from the others kids and always had been. I knew as early as kindergarten that there was something different about me. I was perfectly happy playing by myself or reading. I never liked sports and physical games. I was smarter than the other kids. Oh, and I really liked looking at pictures of other guys in Boys’ Life magazine.

It was when I was ten that the abuse started. First, it was sexual. Some of it was cruel, some of it was quite loving and, (to my naive mind at the time), beautiful. Then the emotional and physical abuse began. Every day in junior high school was a terror followed by humiliations and ridicule when I returned home.

I had three escapes at this time. The first was reading. I became a voracious reader, devouring everything I could find. The second was music, mostly classical and seventies bubblegum. Everyone else my age was listening to Led Zeppelin, Steve Miller, and The Stones. I would not listen to their music. I was listening to The Carpenters and Barry Manilow. The third was sex. I became, at the age of twelve, a compulsive masturbator, indulging sometimes four or five times a day.

In college, my academic over-achieving ended when I discovered my fourth escape- drugs, and how much they improved my third escape, sex. I discovered the gay subculture of the late seventies and ran screaming from the closet.

Today, I realize that the indefinable thing I knew was different about me when I was young is that I am gay. If my first abuser had not known that I would probably grow up to be gay, I doubt he would have chosen me as an easy victim. If everyone at school and in my family had not assumed I was “queer” merely because I was smart and bad at sports, I would not have PTSD today and would probably be a college professor instead of a clerk. And, if I hadn’t been taught that sex is evil and immoral, I might not have needed drugs to overcome my southern Protestant guilt and inhibitions.

But, that’s all in the past. Now, I need to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

Warren G. Harding is notable for a number of things beyond his prodigious sex drive and the corruption of his administration, including his contributions to American grammar and vocabulary. It was he who invented the word “normalcy” as a substitute for the (then) more proper “normality.” It was also he who graced America with the term “bloviate,” meaning to expound authoritatively and in a long-winded fashion on a variety of subjects about which one knows very little.

The incidence of bloviating seems to be at an all-time high in America, on television, in magazines, and especially on the Internet, where any idiot is free to disseminate the most outrageous opinions and propositions. Over the past few years, I have read a number of pompous blogs and journals by pretentious failures who feel they are qualified to pontificate on the great issues of the day. The fact that they are thirty, living in their parents’ garage, and working at the neighborhood cineplex doesn’t seem to disqualify them, in their minds, from telling the world how it should be. Ten years ago, five years ago, even a year or two ago, I might have begun one of those blogs. However, Life, the Universe, and Everything have conspired to hit me over the head with a number of two-by-fours recently and I no longer feel that I can adequately dictate to those who stumble across my blog whether Karl Rove should be disemboweled, Tony Blair boiled in oil, or the Patriot Act shredded before the Bill of Rights is or after. Indeed, I’m not really certain of anything anymore.

Hence, the title of my blog and my pseudonym.

I am embarking on my personal search for truth and I have decided to blog it, to journal my journey, to share my thoughts with anyone who might be interested. Perhaps it will all be fruitless. Perhaps I will find nothing profound or interesting; but, possibly someone out there might be moved by what I find and write and, if so, I will be happy. If not, at least, I will have had an interesting time by myself.