Anti-gay

Was a book of essays from 1996 (!) that critiqued various aspects of gay culture. A reviewer quotes a line from the inside cover...Funny!

"Why (is) being gay like being a member of a religious cult,
except not so open-minded?"

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Irritating tribe

Eating a late breakfast in a local cafe yesterday, glad of the sunshine and the distractions of reading the book on Charlemagne, trying to keep my psychological balance during these personally and societally rollercoasterish times.

I look up at two guys who come in the door and claim a table about twelve feet across from me.

The first is a classic Old Queen. I keep hoping they will retire this model, but I fear that will never happen. The man is in his mid to late 70's. Overweight, pale, gray, with a huge and rather lowhanging belly, covered in his flowing silken short-sleeved Hawaiian-style shirt, a riot of pastels. Large sunglasses. On his hands a set of flashy rings, including one I can only describe as about the biggest digital bauble I have ever seen, and then two sets of bracelets on both arms. He looks up and sees me and flashes a big smile. I do not return it.

His companion is a black or mixed black/white guy about 35. Jeans and a t-shirt, workboots, short hair, nice and solid mesomorphic build and an easy non-dramatic smile.

Escort and client? Friends? Father and son? Who knows. This is San Francisco.

I get up after a few minutes to pay my bill and as I pass the table --another flash from the older guy-- I hear the younger man speaking...with the sibilance and cadence that reminds me of teenage cheerleaders.

God, I hate that. It might be shallow and judgmental and all that stuff, but I don't care. I've had a rough coupla weeks.

One of my darker opinions about many of the denizens of my local ghetto is that their sexual object choices are secondary results of a primary gender identity disorder. Not everyone can or should be John Wayne or John Cena, but, damn, why are ordinary men so difficult to find around here?

Irritating tribe.
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Intriguing

"There is a great deal more in homosexuality than a simple release of new levels of sexual permissiveness. True psychological mating is not only possible between individuals of the same sex, it is actually the rule in human interactions (whether sexual or not). How can two men, biologically alike, find a true difference between them through which mating can occur? The answer is simple but profound in its implications: through character specialization.

What this book says in effect is that character specialization is dominant over biological identity, and that therefore two men (or two women) can have a masculine-feminine interaction which can lay the basis for a true romantic union, pregnant with possibilities for creative self-development. The concept of masculinity and femininity, used in this way, has nothing to do with conventional masculine and feminine roles in our society. Such roles have social roots, not independent psychological ones."

Homosexuality: Psychology of the Creative Process
Paul Rosenfels
1973

Godzdawgs*

Thomas Aquinas Combats the False Teachers
in his Summa Contra Gentiles
Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 13th c.

From the Dominican Friars of Poland...combining a traditional image with a contemporary beat, and a bit of a surprise at 4:25ff.

Note on group cultures. There are two Catholic religious orders I know very well, The Society of Mary, a group of educators of young people, founded in France in the early 19th century, and the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, founded in southern Europe in the early 13th. The first has a dominantly feminine streak in its culture, not only focussed on and vowed to Mary, but with a priority given to feeling and affiliation. The second, although famous for its connection to Mary's rosary, is distinctly masculine, valuing philosophical and theological thinking, dispute and discipline. The first run schools, the second ran the Inquisition.

Ironically, or perhaps complimentarily, the post-1789 mostly lay Marian group has little sense of ceremony or aesthetic, an unusually egalitarian spirit and never even wore a noticeable religious habit, while the historically aggressive mostly priestly Preachers have a monastic ceremonial tradition, a complex (but always elected) hierarchy and governance structure, a somewhat spare but clear aesthetic (Fra Angelico, for example) and wear a striking garb. The Polish video strikes me as very masculine still.

*The Dominican friars' name in Latin sounds a lot like the phrase "Domini canes", which means "The Lord's Dogs". And St. Dominic's mother, while pregnant, dreamed of a dog carrying a torch in its mouth. Young English friars are on the web as Godzdogz. And the Poles...well, it's a pretty interesting piece.

Separated at birth

Always had a soft spot for Eric McCormack, Will, of Will & Grace. Even as I find the show decreasingly good in reruns, I still think he is a damned handsome guy. Now I may know why.
He looks like one of my early adolescent pre-conscious crushes, George Maharis. No?

Loss and age

Had a dream recently which provoked in me a strong sense of the world as the kind of place that the Gnostics thought it was: basically God's nightmare. Mood has a strong influence on perception, so I know that while there is a very hefty case to be made for this attitude, it is not the only one, for sure.

For this and some other reasons, I have been particularly aware of the downside of life of late. And loss seems to be all around me. As you grow older, of course, you have a longer history of losses of all kinds. And if you have any resilience, you can use your past experience to let yourself know that you can survive it. On the other hand, the accumulation over time wears you down.

So I thought this morning of my last surviving sibling. I am one of seven. Six are left. And some day, one of us will be the last one. Having gone through the deaths of the other six.

Normally I am very happy to be part of a large brood. I know people, both as friends and as family, who are one of two, or even just an only child. Large sibling groups have their own problems, of course, but despite that, there is a certain comfort in knowing that a bunch of other people are in your brood.

But these days, where it is grayer on the inside than the outside, I was struck with the melancholy image of my last surviving sister or brother. Since I am the oldest, I am pretty confident that it will not be me. And since men die younger than women, it will likely be one of my sisters. It brings tears to my eyes to think of that.

So, loss. Inescapeable. The more experience you have, the tougher you become about it, I think. But just as much, if not moreso, the more you have of it, the less you have left to be tough with.

Like I said, today it seems the Gnostics had a definite point.

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Oracles

Going thru my list of morning cyber-reading, one of my regular spots showed up with this. I am afraid that it has a wider application. Alas.

In case the image is too small, it reads:

"NOT FOUND. Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here."

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Aw, poor thing

The self-obsessed bitterness that often comes roiling off Maureen Dowd's writing in the NYT seems to have called out to a similar soul who took her place as a guest columnist. He laments that Joe the Plumber's book being published makes real writers think that the world is unfair.

Where do they get these people?

HT to Mark Steyn

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Idiocy

In my cyberwandering, came across this magnificent piece of bumpersticker anti-capital punishment thought:


I ask, in reference, say, to kidnappers, "Why do we imprison people who imprison people to show that imprisoning people is wrong?" Indeed, "why do we hurt people who hurt people to show that hurting people is wrong?"

Assholes.

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Ten Words to the Wise

I sometimes read my old blog posts and wonder who this guy is who is writing this stuff. Although a friend of mine describes himself rightly (and not always pleasantly for others) as having "unity of personality", I wonder if I am a reluctant post-modern man, sorta fragmentary. But I have long become accustomed to the reality that my life and my values do not always match.

So, a post on The Ten Commandments. How this came to mind today or why, I have no idea.




Most people who have any sense of the Ten hear them as a hectoring and scolding list of repressive "thou shalt not's", as the telling phrase goes. Reading them --there are two slightly different versions-- in their original settings in the Bible is interesting. The Catholic catechism version I learned omits the prohibition about graven images and splits the prohibition of coveting into two separate texts: one sexual, one general. The Protestant catechism version gave full voice to the anti-idol text.

Anyway, here's a summary:

1. I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the house of bondage:
you shall have no alien gods before Me.
2. Do not make idols and worship them.
3. Do not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain.
4. Keep the Sabbath day.
5. Honor your father and mother.
6. Do not murder.
7. Do not steal.
8. Do not commit adultery.
9. Do not commit perjury.
10. Do not covet what belongs to your neighbor.

I hear them in a kind of Basic Constitutional framework.

The first four come down to this: A personal God who is the advocate of your life and liberty is the transcendant source of truth and order. So do not corrupt that Center with competing forms of divinity, nor reduce it to an object nor trivialize it. And build into the regular rhythm of life a full sacred day.

The next five outline human society: Marriage and the parent-child bond are to be protected. Life and property are to be respected. Truthfulness in discourse allows trust between people and in their institutions.

The final one names covetousness, inordinate desire, and specifically as envious desire for what belongs to others, as a root drive which must be contained.

One of the techniques I used to use in teaching was imaginary reversal. I found that it helped people appreciate texts that they resisted approaching except in a reactive way. For the Ten Commmandments, as I have interpreted them, try to imagine a societal order shaped by the violation of each and every one of them:

No personal center of value to protect life and liberty, with the result that "sacred" things are both objectified and trivialized and there is no marker of anything sacred in your life's actual calendar. Every day is really just like another.

Men and women, parents and children, distrust and mistreat each other because marriage and family have broken down and are not really valued or protected. Your home is always under threat and you have to watch everything you own, lest you be robbed of it. And people trust neither one another nor their institutions because truth is so hard to come by and speech is really an instrument of power and struggle, nothing more.

Envy is rampant, so no one is happy with what they have, and anyone who has anything has to wonder suspiciously who is out to take it away from them.

Sound familiar? When I lived back East and it was the 70's, I simply used to describe life under the Ten Anti-Commandments as "The South Bronx".

Synchronistically, I have earlier today wandered into an article at The Intellectual Conservative where a long and rather hyper article about principles in politics eventually finds the principles in the Ten Commandments as grounds for a non-theocratic libertarian social contract!

And while I am feeling fragmentary, I ran across Kay Hymowitz' 2005 piece on the crisis in black America as being centered on the collapse of the family and its replacement by single mothers and absentee fathers. Her 2008 update remains pessimistic and supports the radical notion that very much of black America's difficulties stem from this pattern of behavior, not the increasingly hard to find, white racist.

In popular culture and drama prior to the late 60's, a girl pregnant and unmarried was a huge problem. The shame and opprobrium she carried came to seem cruel and intolerant, so now an "unwed mother" has become that cozy-sounding plucky victim-survivor icon, the "single mom". As I have noted before, if you are Murphy Brown, maybe, but Kenisha from Oakland is a different story.

An unpleasant thought occurs: the relatively few individual mothers, and their children, did suffer social stigma back in the bad old days. But the subsequent misery, poverty, emotional and social damage, crime and imprisonment and poisoning of gender relations that the caring and enlightened view has brought about is much worse and for far more many people. Only thirty years from Town Without Pity to New Jack City. Maybe the old attitude reflected ancestral wisdom, which is often unkind, but often true.

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