The Real Homosexual Agenda

Everyone talks about the Homosexual Agenda, but no one has specified exactly what it might be. As I am a homosexual (out! as of right now! no one knew before this instant! except my three thousand-odd tricks and a few close friends and family!), I have decided to share my inferences in this matter. About time, eh?

This is the REAL homosexual agenda:

9 a.m. Espresso macchiato with the most adorable little patterns in the foam, far too pretty to add sugar and ruin it. (Clever I!)

9:30. Shave, shaping beard into exactly symmetrical points outlining chin. This could take 45 minutes. It did yesterday.

10:15. Choose outfit in which to Face the World.

10:45. Change mind, and outfit.

Noon. Breakfast! Oops, more like brunch. The difference between the two: Breakfast can be eaten in solitude; brunch requires gossipy company.

1p.m. Saunter into the daylight, examining shop windows.

2-4. Shopping, unless it is Gym Day. Body sculpting! Cruising! Arguing with my Trainer! (hugely muscled fellow from St. Lucia - he explains the theology of Rastafarianism to me; in return, I promise to get him and his Polish girlfriend into an opera that is neither Russian nor German)

4 - My long-suffering shrink. Bring him flowers of appeasement. Talk for 50 minutes.

5pm. Tea time. ONE biscuit, with unsugared black tea.

6pm. Cocktails for two or howevermany.

MEET! GREET! DITCH! BITCH! (behind their scrawny backs)

7pm. Mad dash to the theater (whichever).

8-10. Theater (or 8-11, opera).

11pm. More cocktails and bitchy analysis of foregoing.

Midnight. Chamomile tea.

1am. Oil of Olay on shadowy skin suggesting but not fore-ordaining pouches under eyes.

1:30. Time for 15 pages of Proust, or at least the comic book version.

2:14a.m. Prayers.

2:15a.m. Lights out. Sleep.

There, Mr. Santorum. That wouldn't be so very terrible, would it? Or would it?

Permanently Single: Is This Where Our Society Going?

My friend Diann, a single heterosexual not quite my age, living alone and loving it in a house in the Connecticut woods, recommends this article from Boston Magazine: http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/single_by_choice_why_more_of_us_than_ever_before_are_happy_to_never_get_married/page1

The article has inspired me (gay man not the least bit interested in marrying another gay man - or even a woman, though I like them better), to some reflections.

People used to marry when they regarded themselves as, primarily, part of a family (tribe if you will). They married, and they married someone their family approved of (ethnicity, religion, politics, job), and the important thing was to have a support in old age and for someone to be available to bring up the children.

In my family, in 1850 (across the Atlantic), they married other Jews in their region, and the marriage was arranged young, except in the case of prosperous widowers for whom age was never a bar. And had scads of children. In 1900, in New York, they still married, always Jews (looking down on those from different regions), and always with the intent to have children. There were fewer of those: No one had more than three. If a wife died (usually in childbirth), the widowed husband was soon married off to her sister or his cousin, so the children would have parents. Children cared for the aging relations. By 1940, the first "lifelong bachelors" had appeared, causes not discussed openly. By 1960, the first intermarriages had shocked the family, and after that ceased to do so. By 2000, half of my relations had married non-Jews if they had married at all. Differences in race or religion or sexual orientation somehow were not as upsetting to any of us as the bitter feuds between Hungarian Jews and Russian Jews had been in 1900. (The first family divorce, by the way, had taken place in 1920. It wasn't the last.)

The Industrial Revolution has slowly changed our familial ways. We are individuals now and feel entitled to suit ourselves in these matters. And we have far fewer children (since we learned how not to do so). The problem of being alone in ill health (as I found with a shoulder out of commission last November) is the one that lingers. Of my six first cousins, only two had children (one of them by a white gentile, the other by a black foreigner - both marriages did not last, by the way). I might have married in my teens (like my great-grandfather) but later than that ... I was far too much the loner. I am also openly gay (and not the only one), which is another signpost of rising individuality. This didn't happen - openly - before Stonewall.

Society in the Industrial West has fewer and fewer families and children, let idiots like Santorum rail against it as they like. We have "families of intention," but they are not linked indissolubly as blood families usually are. You can choose your friends, and you can choose to "unfriend" them, however close they may have become. Society must rethink the matter of people who are alone and old, devise new structures.

The present fallback: Bring in more immigrants to do these chores, to care for the old who are childless or otherwise engaged, and to produce the population mass to replace our decline. This situation has many defects. Immigrants are good at such work, and they absorb our ways, convert to our attitudes, but that takes time, a generation or two (as the Dutch have lately discovered). And we may not have two or three generations until the whole Western industrialized top-heavy mass topples over.

Did we reach the top only to find that our pyramid has uneasy foundations?

Trust. Even more than Love

It's about Trust.

Even more than Love.

I am coming to realize that.

Love without Trust is more trouble and complication than it is worth. (Though it's produced a lot of good opera, drama, novel, folk balladry.)

Trust without Love is still valuable: You know that your
friend/ partner/ relative/ whatever has enough self-esteem not to do you dirty, to look out for you, simply because it is necessary to that self-image.

My aunts, for instance, loved their sister and looked out for her every step of the way through the vicissitudes of old age, last illness and death, and they look out for me because ... it just wouldn't occur to them not to do so. I can rely on that. I can tell them my troubles and get good advice. I can turn to them in need — they both said that if I needed a loan for expenses when Mum died, they would be happy to provide it; I was happy not to need it, but it made me very calm that they could say it, and that I knew they meant it.

It is necessary for me – maybe for anyone – to have someone to whom I can say anything and know my privacy will be respected. To be able to give someone my keys (and passwords!) and know they'll take care of things in my absence or illness.

(God knows what it was like to live under communism or fascism, when informers were everywhere! I've read some fascinating books on this subject, notably Anna Funder's Stasiland and Timothy Garton Ash's The File, but ... how much of the real experience do they convey? Especially as Funder and Ash, like me, were outsiders, though, in Ash's case, across the Wall and under observation. It is unimaginable to us, privileged to live in America. I cannot forget certain conversations I had in Berlin while The Wall was still up, in Prague soon after it came down. A world with little trust.)

Plenty of people probably do not have such totally trustworthy persons in their lives, or are themselves unable to yield absolutely to Trust. Others grew up in families that did not nurture that sort of trust, or had lovers or friends become addicted to something. Among Witches, one encounters many children of betrayal, searching for the kindly parents they didn't have, and it worries me, and complicates coven politics. I'm sure it's true of priests and evangelical ministers, certainly of those who head radical political movements.

Freud spoke of The Transference: His patients began to see him as a father, a lover, a god, fixing all their betrayed hopes upon his omniscience and benevolence. He could see this might easily lead to trouble, and of course it often did.

Trust is key to making a society.

Love may be a good idea for one's ethical life, but one can live without it.

Plenty of people do.

Or it turns up in the oddest, most unpredictable places.

But Trust is key.

Or we are all, shatteringly, alone. And, facing mortality, we are alone anyway. But we can seek some relief for that.

As Grace Slick would say, "You better find somebody to trust."

This is a reflection on my great number of dear and trustworthy friends, especially perhaps on the ones who were attentive and useful after my surgery in November, and the unforgotten many who were so devoted after my lymphoma in 1997.

Robot Wars

Articles in many media lately trace the increasing use of drones and robots in America's wars. This sort of thing may save a few American lives, but enables those who manipulate our foreign policy to serve the military-industrial complex.

Their thinking is very simple really:

1) American business makes a fortune from warfare, possibly couldn't stay afloat without it (since the rest of our manufacturing sector has been shipped overseas).

2) The Vietnam convulsion, near-civil war in the U.S. and abysmal morale (much fragging) among the troops, not to mention the destruction of two powerful presidents, demonstrated that Americans will refuse to fight wars merely on the whim of their leaders. They only see their sacrifice as justifiable in defense of the country, which no foreign nation is likely to attack. (No foreign country has ever done so except once, and the Japanese probably won't try again.) So the Draft was eliminated and no one in D.C. dares even whisper the word. As a direct result, most of America, especially young and privileged America which fueled the anti-war demonstrations around Vietnam, no longer cares what the military do.

3) The volunteer military also costs a bundle, though it has the beneficial result of permitting poor youth with no other affordable way to education and career to escape their situation. But their treatment in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts (and the import of mercenary "guards" to do the real dirty work) is also causing political trauma and unrest. They, too, would rather stick to clearly defensive operations. This has not gone unnoticed at the top.

4) A drone/robot military can spend all the government money and incur all the foreign bloodshed it likes; the American public will remain indifferent since their blood will not be shed, and the arms business marches on while the economy sinks and our international reputation goes down the drain.

Rejoice, muzhiki!

The greatness of Alexander of Macedon - or as I call him, Sandy Mac

Mary Beard (and who if not she?) has taken some writers on Big Al (or Sandy Mac) to task in the current New York Review of Books. (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/oct/27/alexander-how-great/)

The conquests of Alexander of Macedon (note: hard "c") were so extraordinarily vast in large part because he did not conquer twenty different nations - the Persians (Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes) had already done that, and ruled their empire for two hundred years. Alexander conquered their hapless heir, Darius III, and the centralized power fell to pieces. He took over all of the nations so included and then marched (which took three years) through its eastern marches and down the Indus to the Arabian Sea, sailing home. Much of the heavy work had been done for him. But he led the army and founded the colonies and distributed the spoils.

Alexander's pretensions to greatness owe much to his uncompleted project to unify the Greek and Persian worlds (with some Egyptian influence), turning his conquests into a universal state. This could never have lasted in the technological spirit of the time and, without him, it fell to pieces almost immediately. But the Greek cultural influence on the Far East (Buddhist sculpture, e.g.) and on trade in the Levant, plus the introduction of Chaldean mathematics and astronomy (and astrology) into the Greek and Egyptian (and Jewish) worlds grew directly from his actions and transformed the world. For one thing, this new "Greek-speaking" universe was absorbed by Rome, and then absorbed Rome in turn, proving the basis for an empire that lasted until the fifteenth century of our era. For another, the multiplex religious theories interacting throughout the region in Alexander's wake eventually produced the two major monotheistic religions that still occupy Europe and the Middle East (as well, as is often forgotten, as thousands of other faiths, extinct or surviving or heretical).

Alexander's legend endures in the mythologies of so many lands (Greek and Persian merely the most notable) because of his generalship and early death. But his greatness is the cultural bequest that derives from his visionary imagination as much as his martial abilities.

Why I Celebrate Columbus Day

I have the gall today to celebrate the 520th anniversary of the most memorable bump and grind in the history of the Bahamas, the landing of Cristóbal Colon, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, on his way over the edge of history. I may be the only pagan in the Americas who thinks this is something appropriate to celebrate.

Now, I know just what everyone is going to say. They’re going to say, How dare you celebrate the man responsible for the massacre of millions of Indi– I mean, Native Ameri– no, they weren’t Americans of any sort yet either. Well, whoever they were. The man who wiped out whole civilizations, and then lied about it!

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to the Nativist point of view: White culture cannot be called an unmixed blessing. But I would argue that post-European patriarchal culture has not been a total loss just because, after the Indians kept it a going concern for 12,000 years, we have run North America into the ground in a mere 500.

As a proper Pagan I try to be entirely xenophile, and my multiculturalism includes Europe, which has provided many things today’s pagans might find indispensable—the doctrine of separating church and state, for instance, devised by Europeans on and off Europe after many, many trials and many, many executions. I mean, many, many errors.

Also, let’s keep blame in proper perspective: While Columbus was certainly a shit, the overwhelming majority of the native casualties died of microbial onslaught unsuspected by the whites. (Who knew measles were lethal?) Nor were Indian conquerors (Aztec, Inca, Carib, Iroquois) more humane than the Spaniards when the mood was on them. And some whites did have qualms and second thoughts, and tried to stop the brutality. Queen Isabella’s dying words were an entreaty to Ferdinand to protect the natives. Typically, he paid no attention to her.

But I’m celebrating Columbus Day because, 519 years ago, the brave and astonishing actions of this overbearing and egotistical Genovese transformed the world (all of it), for better and for worse (both). If there is a single event that marks forever the break between the old Europe, culturally obsessed with fawning upon Classical Antiquity, and the new Europe, sure of its abilities to handle anything that came along and make anything of it, the Europe that thereupon invented Medicine and modern Science and modern Democracy and the modern world (all of them overrated achievements, perhaps, but undeniably impressive), it was Columbus’s first voyage.

True, Columbus was not a nice man. He had his little ways. He boasted. He lied. He claimed credit for other people’s deeds. He allowed the locals to be treated abominably. He made such a nuisance of himself that the colonists ignored and imprisoned him. And then they behaved worse.

Too, he did not do the two things everyone remembers him having done: prove the world round or discover America. The Norse, for one, had reached America centuries before him. The Bretons and Basques had been fishing the Grand Banks for years and keeping a good thing to themselves. Irish monks had got here even before the Norse. Roman coins have been found. Phoenicians are a possible. Chinese and Japanese contacts with the Peruvian coast have been deduced (from pottery, mostly). And if you take the Book of Mormon seriously (Heaven help you), the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel had been here for millennia.

Most notable of all, and something folks seem to forget in all the debates, the Western hemisphere was very heavily populated at the time Columbus arrived and for at least twelve thousand years before that (possibly three times that long), so talk of his “discovering” something quite unknown is a bit eccentric, never mind Eurocentric.

What Columbus almost undoubtedly was is the first Italian to reach the New World. If you’ve ever tried to find an inexpensive and filling meal in New York after midnight, you know how significant that is, and how worthy of celebration. But that is not my reason for wishing the occasion well either.

On the round world thing: Columbus did not prove it. He never made it further than the Orinoco in Guyana, for one thing, but more important, no authority in Europe at that time believed the world flat. The ancient Greek astronomers had proved it was round, and during the Renaissance everyone read the Greeks. The tale that the medieval church thought the world flat and that Columbus defied the scholars of his time was invented in the nineteenth century, probably by Washington Irving. Columbus was examined by the doctors of the great university of Salamanca (which I visited last November: They will show you the sublime monastic church where the discussion took place), but it wasn’t the shape of the world that gave pause; it was its size.

The Greeks deduced the world was round because, when there was an eclipse of the moon, no matter where the moon was in the sky, the shadow of the earth upon it was always circular. Clever, eh? Even cleverer, one of them had measured it. That was why the astronomers of Salamanca told Isabella that Asia was much too far away to reach without stopping for supplies or fresh water en route. If there were no America, they would have been quite right.

Nonsense, said Columbus; the world is only half that size by my calculations, and we can reach Asia in about six weeks. (Here we see the true visionary at work, though it is also possible that he knew of the Basque fishing expeditions.)

His calculations, in fact, were wrong, and the Salamanca astronomers were right, and it took him ten weeks, with a pause at the Canaries, but who remembers all that now?

More important, from the European point of view, was the intellectual ripple from Columbus’s discovery. (I use the word “discovery” here in the sense of: That restaurant/resort/rock band/hem length is my discovery—they may have existed, and people knew of them, but I made them known, seekable, chic. America was nothing to talk about before Columbus discovered it, darling. Even the people here were simply unaware there was anyplace else to be.)

Renaissance Europe suffered from a terrible sense of inferiority: Nothing they did was ever as good as what the Greeks and Romans had done. No poem was as good as the Aeniad, they sighed, and no building so noble as the Pantheon, and no play as sharp as Oedipus or Medea, or as funny as the Menaechmi, and the plumbing was just not up to old Roman standard, and all the knowledge anyone would ever gain was never so great as Aristotle had possessed, or said he did. Even the printing press did not (at first) seem such hot stuff, and gunpowder was a nuisance—smelly, too. The only decided improvement over the ancients, the old Europeans would have told you, was in religion: Moderns were able to achieve salvation from sins the pagan ancients had never even realized they were committing. Good News indeed!

Suddenly, incontrovertibly, Columbus presented them with a great big Secret, something the ancients hadn’t even guessed at, a secret as big as Asia itself (and far less able to fight back). Renaissance thinkers began to feel they weren’t so mediocre after all. They began to get cocky. They suggested all sorts of things that contradicted their elders: That the earth went around the sun (a theory considered and discarded by the Greeks, actually). That blood circulates in the body. That plays could be good even if they didn’t preserve the classical unities. That salvation was a matter of opinion, and not necessarily the priest’s opinion. That women could vote—uh, no, that came later.

The process begun in 1492 may be said to have reached its climax in Mantua in 1597, when modern man devised something beyond the dreams of the ancients destined to alter humanity’s view of itself forever: Grand Opera. After that, the conquest of the universe was just a matter of time. Round up a search party of expendable crew members and meet me in the Transporter Room.

America was the first step on the road to the stars, the key that Columbus, ignorant as Alice and every bit as childish, accidentally found on the table by the flask marked "Explore me," and used to enter the long-locked door to the garden of the future.

Columbus created the world we now inhabit, warts and all, but at least it’s ours. And, as he said, when standing an egg on its end, “Sure anybody coulda done it. I did it.”

He had a point, or rather, as with the egg, he made one where no one else had.

HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY!

The Invader

I dreamed an old woman said she had been assigned to live in my apartment. It was a social services department and if I didn’t like it, and I didn’t, I could argue with them. She said it wasn’t very clean here (well, it isn’t) and she put things away where I couldn’t find them. I screamed at her and she screamed right back, and neither of us could sleep. She tried to open a coffee bar in one of the rooms (how did I get more rooms here?) and when the department social workers came to check up on her, they ignored my protests about the whole situation and reproached me for my “attitude.” My aunt tried to help out, but experience as she is with bureaucracies, she didn’t get anywhere.

One time I took some of the old woman’s milk for my coffee. It was easier than going out and buying more, and besides, who knew what she’d do while I was out? She might change the locks. I was sure she was just waiting to change the locks. The second time I borrowed milk, she noticed. She didn’t say anything, but she began to use my sugar. I was furious but I couldn’t very well object.

She got the papers of my writings all mixed up. She threw out trash that wasn’t ready to be thrown out yet. She objected to my leaving the windows open. Her friends came to visit and I couldn’t walk around naked any more.

One day I came home and she had died. I was delighted, but the department soon sent an old man to replace her. He accused me of having sex with strange men in my room. (Well, I was.) He also said I was a communist. I told him he was a fascist.

He screamed louder and more insistently than the old woman had, and he was much filthier. He used my toothbrush. I threw his pills in the toilet, hoping he’d have a coronary. He stank. I refused to wear clothes on hot days. He said he couldn’t have friends over. I said, “Good.” He was late with the rent check and the landlord threatened to throw me out. There was nothing I could do. He was here to stay.

He was Old Age.