There is a guy who is using Scandinavia as an example of how gay marriages are destroying heterosexual marriages:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/660zypwj.asp
It's a very interesting article, considering that gay marriage doesn't exist in Scandinavia. Look at what this other guy has to say about it:
http://www.law.ucla.edu/williamsproj/issues/perverted.html
Saturday, November 19, 2005
When and Today
I'm not taking very good care of my blog. My excuse is that most of the time i run around like a headless chicken (i always use the same expression to talk about it; my grandma told me once a story about a headless chicken; no, my grandma wasn't so weird, and the headless chicken did exist, and it ran around; it was a funny story, except for the chicken, although since it didn't have a head anymore, it could no longer distinguish between what was funny and what was not). I suppose that i could organize my time better in order to write more, but that would require that i dreg more passion from somewhere and pour into the making of this blog, and passion is hard to come by these days. Shortness of supply and demand and all that.
So, instead of actually writing for the blog, i'll just paste my latest school magazine article. The main topic this issue is sexuality and, although i'm part of both the mag activity and the gay-straight alliance, i can swear i didn't have anything to do with picking this subject. It nags me to think, however, that some people will think so. It nags me even more that i still care.
Of course, everybody knows that we queers are proselitizers and want to turn everybody into copies of ourselves.
Anyways, here is what i wrote:
WHEN AND TODAY
WHEN i started to feel sexually attracted towards other people, i was disgusted with myself. The problem was, i was finding some guys attractive, sexually appealing, but nothing like that happened to me with any girl. I mean, i thought some girls were indeed pretty, and i had friends who were themselves girls, but i wasn't drawn to them in that way. I concluded something had to be wrong with me: it was obvious from everything I saw and experienced around myself. For instance: the worst insults people threw at each other (and sometimes at me) were basically words that implied the existence of such feelings of same-sex attraction on the "insultee". Maricón is the main such word in Spanish, the equivalent of the English faggot. The occasional maricones in movies and on TV were silly, vain, destructive men, always whimpering or being made fun of. At other times they would try to take sexual advantage of children, or they would appear in the news as diseased, dying of AIDS, cross-dressing or clad in strange leather garments and taking drugs. Sometimes they were arrested by the police, and occasionally you would hear about and see images of one such person having been beaten to death. In talk shows they appeared lonely and were repetitively shunned by family and friends. They were unnatural, evil, sick, weak, perverted.
I did not want to be, do or have happen to me any of those things, so i knew i had to change. Problem was, i could not! No matter how hard i tried. And i tried everything i could, for years -- nine of them!
I confessed at church my evil thoughts, and prayed a lot, but i still felt the same things, it could not be helped. Later i made myself date girls, though it did not feel natural to me. On the contrary, this worsened the view i had of myself, for i knew that i was lying to them. I was using them not only to try to "change" myself, but they were also a front that protected me from anyone's suspicions. I was conscious of doing this, and i felt despicable.
The only thing I did not do was talk to my parents because, what would they say? I knew what they thought of maricones already. I did not want to hurt them or, worse yet, lose their love. Besides, what could they do? Pray with me? Send me to a psychiatrist? I had read what Freud had to say about homosexuality (he agreed with everybody else), but how would that cure me? Since all my research on the topic had to be done on the sly, i did not know then what i learnt later: that there are so called re-orientation organizations, which teach homosexual people how to become heterosexual (in practice, what they do is to hammer in the importance of behaving heterosexually; many of their "graduates" have reported, after years of lying to themselves, that the feelings of homosexual attraction do not just go away). I also didn't know that electro-shock therapy had been tried on homosexuals.
If I had come upon any text that mentioned those re-orientation classes, or that claimed the goodness of electro-shock treatment (and there are several such articles on psychiatric magazines of the 50s, 60s, 70s and even the 80s), i would have asked that it all be tried on me.
Now, with several more years to look back upon, i wonder at my good luck. Who would have thought that i'd become an advocate for ignorance? Yet there are occasions in which it is a blessing, after all. In the environment i grew up in, knowledge of the options available to me then would have probably destroyed my life.
- - - - - - o - - - - - -
TODAY my views about sexuality in general and my own in particular are quite different.
I believe that a man can fall in love with another man and that they can create a loving family, raise children and have the support of relatives, friends and the wider community.
I believe that if there is a god, s/he/it would judge us by the depth and truth of all our loves, rather than by the gender of our romantic lover.
I believe that families and friends are actively created and looked after. If someone i love cannot accept me because of my sexuality, it will hurt. But in the long run it will hurt less than knowing i am loved for something i am not.
I believe that sicknesses must be treated, because they stop people from being happy. The sickness that affects me is called "prejudiced society". Fortunately, i believe it has a cure.
I believe that sexuality is about the kind of attraction we feel, not about the sex we have. Thus, i might decide not to act on my feelings of sexual attraction, but my sexuality would still be what it is.
I believe that to repress the acknowledgement of my sexuality could make of me a terribly unhappy and unfulfilled person. Romantic love is one of the fundamental dimensions through which people learn and grow.
I believe that all those movies and TV shows were lying to me, by omission at least. They never showed people like my friends Evan and Michael, who have been living together for 35 years and are two perfectly normal librarians, or David and Miguel, who have adopted a little boy and a little girl named Zev and Summer, or Joe and Mike, who got married in June and are university professors. They did not show my mom, my dad and my brothers, or how their views have changed.
Finally, i believe that a day will come when people will not be judged, shunned, discriminated, killed, beaten or murmured about because of their sexuality. I believe that, until that day, people have to speak up, ask questions, argue, so that it comes sooner rather than later.
So, instead of actually writing for the blog, i'll just paste my latest school magazine article. The main topic this issue is sexuality and, although i'm part of both the mag activity and the gay-straight alliance, i can swear i didn't have anything to do with picking this subject. It nags me to think, however, that some people will think so. It nags me even more that i still care.
Of course, everybody knows that we queers are proselitizers and want to turn everybody into copies of ourselves.
Anyways, here is what i wrote:
WHEN AND TODAY
WHEN i started to feel sexually attracted towards other people, i was disgusted with myself. The problem was, i was finding some guys attractive, sexually appealing, but nothing like that happened to me with any girl. I mean, i thought some girls were indeed pretty, and i had friends who were themselves girls, but i wasn't drawn to them in that way. I concluded something had to be wrong with me: it was obvious from everything I saw and experienced around myself. For instance: the worst insults people threw at each other (and sometimes at me) were basically words that implied the existence of such feelings of same-sex attraction on the "insultee". Maricón is the main such word in Spanish, the equivalent of the English faggot. The occasional maricones in movies and on TV were silly, vain, destructive men, always whimpering or being made fun of. At other times they would try to take sexual advantage of children, or they would appear in the news as diseased, dying of AIDS, cross-dressing or clad in strange leather garments and taking drugs. Sometimes they were arrested by the police, and occasionally you would hear about and see images of one such person having been beaten to death. In talk shows they appeared lonely and were repetitively shunned by family and friends. They were unnatural, evil, sick, weak, perverted.
I did not want to be, do or have happen to me any of those things, so i knew i had to change. Problem was, i could not! No matter how hard i tried. And i tried everything i could, for years -- nine of them!
I confessed at church my evil thoughts, and prayed a lot, but i still felt the same things, it could not be helped. Later i made myself date girls, though it did not feel natural to me. On the contrary, this worsened the view i had of myself, for i knew that i was lying to them. I was using them not only to try to "change" myself, but they were also a front that protected me from anyone's suspicions. I was conscious of doing this, and i felt despicable.
The only thing I did not do was talk to my parents because, what would they say? I knew what they thought of maricones already. I did not want to hurt them or, worse yet, lose their love. Besides, what could they do? Pray with me? Send me to a psychiatrist? I had read what Freud had to say about homosexuality (he agreed with everybody else), but how would that cure me? Since all my research on the topic had to be done on the sly, i did not know then what i learnt later: that there are so called re-orientation organizations, which teach homosexual people how to become heterosexual (in practice, what they do is to hammer in the importance of behaving heterosexually; many of their "graduates" have reported, after years of lying to themselves, that the feelings of homosexual attraction do not just go away). I also didn't know that electro-shock therapy had been tried on homosexuals.
If I had come upon any text that mentioned those re-orientation classes, or that claimed the goodness of electro-shock treatment (and there are several such articles on psychiatric magazines of the 50s, 60s, 70s and even the 80s), i would have asked that it all be tried on me.
Now, with several more years to look back upon, i wonder at my good luck. Who would have thought that i'd become an advocate for ignorance? Yet there are occasions in which it is a blessing, after all. In the environment i grew up in, knowledge of the options available to me then would have probably destroyed my life.
- - - - - - o - - - - - -
TODAY my views about sexuality in general and my own in particular are quite different.
I believe that a man can fall in love with another man and that they can create a loving family, raise children and have the support of relatives, friends and the wider community.
I believe that if there is a god, s/he/it would judge us by the depth and truth of all our loves, rather than by the gender of our romantic lover.
I believe that families and friends are actively created and looked after. If someone i love cannot accept me because of my sexuality, it will hurt. But in the long run it will hurt less than knowing i am loved for something i am not.
I believe that sicknesses must be treated, because they stop people from being happy. The sickness that affects me is called "prejudiced society". Fortunately, i believe it has a cure.
I believe that sexuality is about the kind of attraction we feel, not about the sex we have. Thus, i might decide not to act on my feelings of sexual attraction, but my sexuality would still be what it is.
I believe that to repress the acknowledgement of my sexuality could make of me a terribly unhappy and unfulfilled person. Romantic love is one of the fundamental dimensions through which people learn and grow.
I believe that all those movies and TV shows were lying to me, by omission at least. They never showed people like my friends Evan and Michael, who have been living together for 35 years and are two perfectly normal librarians, or David and Miguel, who have adopted a little boy and a little girl named Zev and Summer, or Joe and Mike, who got married in June and are university professors. They did not show my mom, my dad and my brothers, or how their views have changed.
Finally, i believe that a day will come when people will not be judged, shunned, discriminated, killed, beaten or murmured about because of their sexuality. I believe that, until that day, people have to speak up, ask questions, argue, so that it comes sooner rather than later.
Friday, November 11, 2005
Edinburgh Purr...
Or Edinburgh bra, if one is to be consequent with local pronunciation.
Anyway, the break is coming to an end. Boo-hoo-hoo.
Yesterday i sat for about an hour on Arthur's Seat (an old volcano, smack in the middle of the city! Is this a funky town or what?!?), got my hair blown by the wind and looked about myself, all the way out to the sea, while listening to old Celtic music. Ingredients for a transcendental experience? Perhaps not, but i pondered: does what we see remain somewhere? I mean, things obviously decay, rub away, disappear, but is the experience stored somehow? Can some mind some where some time see and feel what someone felt 10000 years ago?
I like to believe the answer is yes. But i'm not talking about god here, mind you.
Yesterday evening Mariteria and i went to see Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, this super cool play by Tennessee Williams. Clap clap for the actors, people! Brick was anything but, though: more like a bon-bon, actually. Maggie the cat was good, too. They had tough roles to act, particularly for Scottish actors who not only have to get down the complex emotions in the play, but also the Southern drawls of the characters. Sometimes they didn't quite manage the latter, and the Scottish closed vowels spilled everywhere, dragged around...
Connection ending, gotta publish before i loose it.
Anyway, the break is coming to an end. Boo-hoo-hoo.
Yesterday i sat for about an hour on Arthur's Seat (an old volcano, smack in the middle of the city! Is this a funky town or what?!?), got my hair blown by the wind and looked about myself, all the way out to the sea, while listening to old Celtic music. Ingredients for a transcendental experience? Perhaps not, but i pondered: does what we see remain somewhere? I mean, things obviously decay, rub away, disappear, but is the experience stored somehow? Can some mind some where some time see and feel what someone felt 10000 years ago?
I like to believe the answer is yes. But i'm not talking about god here, mind you.
Yesterday evening Mariteria and i went to see Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, this super cool play by Tennessee Williams. Clap clap for the actors, people! Brick was anything but, though: more like a bon-bon, actually. Maggie the cat was good, too. They had tough roles to act, particularly for Scottish actors who not only have to get down the complex emotions in the play, but also the Southern drawls of the characters. Sometimes they didn't quite manage the latter, and the Scottish closed vowels spilled everywhere, dragged around...
Connection ending, gotta publish before i loose it.
Sunday, November 06, 2005
London Schmondon
Nah, not Schmondon. I actually like this city, more than i like others, in fact. Yesterday i ate about half a kilo of sashimi (should put a lid on my cravings for a while), went to Gay's The Word (great book store, near Russell Sq.) and then walked in Chinatown and Leicester Square. Love looking at people. Everyone's inside their little bubble, which collide or caress or simply slide past each other. A map of these interactions would probably look like a picture of a cauldron bubbling... or no: more like an explosion at a soap factory and the subsequent mess when firemen come to put out the fire. Hah!
I'm all random today. Been thinking of attempting to get a job in Svalbard...
Anyway, got only 6 minutes left in this connection. Gotta check my mail.
I'm all random today. Been thinking of attempting to get a job in Svalbard...
Anyway, got only 6 minutes left in this connection. Gotta check my mail.
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