Gay Men in Iraq

CLICK ON THE TITLE OF THIS POST TO TAKE YOU TO THE NEWS ARTICLE

The human stories left uncovered by the mainstream press are chilling and horrendous. The Middle East is the last place any gay man should be - but if you are Arab you are a suspect immediately in the West because of your heritage. Asylum - where? Where do you go? Caught between the hatred of their fellow Muslims and the mistrust and prejudice of those in European and North American governments, gay Arabs are being abducted, imprisioned, tortured and murdered. While the fates of gays in Egypt, Iran, Palenstine, Israel* and Saudi Arabia are sometimes documented, those nations are rarely pressured on their human rights abuses, especially those towards gays, whose very civil equality and leagal recourse is under threat even here in our supposedly humane United States. So, it should be better in American 'liberated' Iraq, especially with Saddam executed. Right?

Wrong.

Whether we want to admit it or not the prejudices held towards GLBT people in the West are a huge stumbling block to protecting the lives of gay men in the Middle East. Think the constantly voiced intolerance of the Vatican and the Christian Right are justified and noble? Try wondering if you'll be in your own home tomorrow - and alive. Or worrying that you won't die quickly enough.

Every time a voice is raised in Rome and Washington against gay and lesbian equality it gives tacit permission to those in third world and developing countries to take it to whole new levels. It's a very small world. Please read the article, and next time YOU decry gay equality think about EVERYONE who's listening.

____________________________________________

YOU CAN MAKE CHANGE HAPPEN

Contact your elected representatives and demand fair and equitable asylum reviews. Demand civil equality for all people. Contact your religious leaders and remind them of their responsibilty to protect life. Vocally REFUSE your support of anti-gay discrimiantion.

And please give generously of your time and money to the Human Rights Campaign, OUTRAGE!, GLAAD and your local AIDS relief organizations.

*The ultra-conservative Jewish faction's opposition to GLBT Equality has resulted in unprecedented violent public attacks against the gay community in Jerusalem. While the Israeli courts have ordered that PRIDE events cannot be shut down by the government every sort of obstruction, including physically attacking marchers and their supporters, are routinely ignored by civil authorities.

Gotham

In The City That Never Sleeps

Repeat the Sound of Joy

One wonders how to find the JOY this Christmas. How do we let go of our hurt and anger to find the commonality which binds us? Whether it is as huge and unfathomable as Government, Churches and war or as intimate as parenst, brother, sister and misunderstandings, it become increasingly difficult to see the good. The peacemaker in me wishes to reach out and find the bridge between each of us, yet the man who feels betrayed wants only to make his injuries known.

So, I fall flat on my face somewhere in between. Each time I extend understanding and find rejection my human nature wants only to recoil and strike out and cause injury again in return. It's ignoble and frustrating to this way fail again and again. And as impartial as I'd like to become, to cast aside any thought of concern for what others think of or feel for me, it's just not to be done. So, I mostly face each day with a sense of failing myself and others - as though the burden of peacemaker indeed rests solely with me.

I don't have the answers. I struggle with forgiving those who have harmed me and I imagine they struggle to forgive me for the harm I've caused. Perhaps understanding in this life is more than can be expected. So, I'll look to the next. And the JOY? Well, if I remember to look it's there. In a husband who stands by me and loves me despite years of struggle. A daughter who sees in me a parent I never expected to be. In the affection of furry little cat-people who think the sun rises and sets by me.

This then is JOY - for in each I see Jesus, born yet again in each of us. I may never enjoy the consolation of all my family being together in a loving way, or the world at peace, but I have this little family right now. I am grateful and full of peace for this at least. So, repeat the sound of JOY. Again and again!

Happy Holidays from Manhattan!

The holidays in New York City include the Washington Monument created by Stanford White in the Beaux Arts stle of the turn of the last century.

Church & State, Church & State, Church & State: Shall We Continue to Give the State God's Due?

It came to my attention in a news article today, written by Wayne Bessen that a new Representative, Keith Ellison, Democrat, Wisconsin, who is Muslim has asked to be sworn on his Faith's Holy Book, the Koran, and not the Bible. Here are the problems I see:

1. The American Family Council ( which is rabidly Anti-Gay, Anti-Muslim, Anti-anyone who is not a Fundamentalist Christian AND prescribing to the A.F.C. Doctrines for the U.S. Government's integartion of Religion into Public Istitutions) has already attacked the new Senator and has immediately tried to pass legislation that only the Bible may be used at swearings in of public servants. This is yet another attack on the Freedom of Religion and the Separation of Church and State. It is important to stomp out these efforts of division and isolation of others personal beliefs and Faiths.

Solution 1: We MUST either allow that other holy books (such as the Koran), and others, if they exist, supporting the Faith of the person being sworn into office to be used. Or, 2: Find a State Symbol, such as a copy of the Constitution, to swear all persons into office, and to simply make our Civil Duty be sworn by a Civil Text. Why? Because, we cannot continue in our pluralistic society to allow Fundamentalist Christians to force their personal belief system on all society by establishing what can surely be understood to be a State Church forced upon the American people.

The Religious Right is up to many of these divisive, un-Christian and simply hateful programs, legal actions and editorial whinings which are destructive to what we understand as our basic rights and freedoms in this Our United States. Frightening, sad and just plain evil at times in their misplaced zeal, these men and women supposedly of God seem to forget to love their neighbor as themselves and to reach out to their fellow Americans with arms of inclusion: Jewish, Budhist, Pagan, Atheist and Agnostic... as well as others I'm sure. When will they understand that coercion to convert is no conversion at all - and pray they remeber to set a better example, the only way to bring non-believers to become true believers.

Mr. Besen's article, an Op-Ed opiece may be read first hand at 365Gay.com. Clicking on the Title of this posting will take you to a thoughtful and educated opinion which realizes what the American Constitution has grown and blossomed into over some 250 years, reminding us that we, as Americans, have stood on the high ground of allowing all men to choose their Faith or none at all. Simply because these choices may be radically different than our own, and perhaps even frightening to us at times, we must remember that Christians are called to be inclusive and not resentful and angry because our Constituion and Bill of Rights are now understood, through legislative and court mandated changes over thes last centuries, to include ever broadening definitions of "All men are created equal."

If any Christian American, or American of any faith, rightly practiced, under our protections of the Constitution cannot understand how important this growth of inclusion has been to so many groups of Americans we must simply remind them that under Jeffersonian ideals of "all men are equally created" his generation refered very narrowly to include only white, European men. But, wisely, with broadly worded passages thus leaving room to be reintrepreted as the Nation grew so that we now have the blessing of women being made 'equal in the vote', blacks made equal and freed from slavery, Catholics and Jews allowed to practice their faiths and to run for public offices in America - so many things our generation takes for granted but which would never have occured to our Founding Fathers. That is why our Constitution is a Living Document, not unlike the Bible or Coran, and not simply a stale centuries old manuscript without much current meaning. It is a gift, a great gift. And I pray, hope and plead with you all to be glad that a man could swear his allegiance to these United States of America with the text of the book he uses to lead his own Godly and Spiritual life. We are stronger for the amalgamation of many ethnicities and beliefs, not weakened.

Don Larson, 8 December 2006

Wayne Besen is an author, activist, columnist and public speaker.

He is a former spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay and lesbian advocacy group. He has appeared as a guest on leading news and political talk shows including: the NBC Nightly News, The Roseanne Show, CNN's Talk Back Live and The Point, Fox's O'Reilly Factor and Hannity and Colmes, Hard Copy, MSNBC News and PAX's Faith Under Fire.

Besen is the author of a book nominated this year for two Lambda Literary Awards, "Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth"

Thoughts on Advent & Christmas

It's December 4, 2006 and it doesn't feel like a Holiday Season at all. Neither like Advent or Christmas. Everything just is... Partly, this is a reaction to having lived without any of our personal belongings for over a year now. I know that's a big part. as I am a 'nester' and to not have the special world of my home to lend a wall of insulation form the horrors of illness, finacial woes and governmental crazies is a sore place to be. But it's more. It's also having lost my Church as it falls prey to an ultra-conservative contigient of men who are incapable of any Christ-like attitude towards the gay men and women they cannot comprehend being part of God's family. Not receiving Our Lord in Holy Communion in order to meet their regulations of what is right and wrong has left a great emptyness. I miss Jesus in the Sacrament so very much - but to deny my sexuality, or my spouse and daughter, in order to receive Him in Communion is wrong. Jesus would not ask me to deny those he has given unto me to love and defend, rather He would wish me to bear this cross of missing Him and remaining true to Mark and Joy, my family.

Mark and I often pray together. We ask Jesus to be our hearts, our minds and our toungues. We ask him, as two or more gathered, to keep His Word of being with us and I know He does stay with us. He does speak for us and He loves us for being true to our vows to each other made in Him. But, I miss Him in the mysteries of the Bread and Wine.

I hope that through this long advent of our souls we will be reminded by Jesus this Christmas that He is reborn to us and in us and that this Christmas, without its trimmings and presents and usual bounty, we will find Jesus as a baby in the manger - and in our daily lives for the coming year.

So, dearest Christ Child, I offer you this desert that Mark and I have been crossing together and ask you to bless the journey and bring it to its end - a rebirth in you our true Love and our Hearts' Desire!

World AIDS Day

Today AIDS is 25 years old - according to record keepers. It hardly seems possible. I remember the night I started to worry I was driving back into Yuma with Peggy and Danny from the Foothills. The radio was announcing that a mysterious diesease was affecting gay men... I wasn't 'OUT' yet apparently I didn't need to be. Danny remarked he was sure they'd find a cure, with empathy directed towards me. Did they know? I wondered, and let the disease slip from my mind as I worried about being found out. Pretty stupid. That was 1982. I would sero-convert in 1991.

As of today I have been battling this disease for 15 years. I have had numerous days of good health - and just as many bad in that time. I have been down to two (2) T-cells and off the chart viral load, with opportunistic infections out the ying-yang, and I have had my numbers high enough to almost forget the disease - except for the miriad of pills and injections I take daily to fight. And I'm very lucky. I live in the West where the determination of the Gay community and our activism means that I have support for obtaining drugs, medical treatment and a miriad of services that are mostly NOT available to the worlds largest AIDS populations: Africa, India and the rest of what we call the 'Third World'. There, AIDS is still so stigmatized that countries like South Africa have even denied their citizens the importation of AIDS medications. (Think about that for a minute - we're not talking just 'tribes in the bush', but huge British built cities, similar to London or New York, with Western educated populations, denied all HIV/AIDS medications). Unbelievable in the 21st century. But, then we look at the present U.S. administrations policy of teaching abstinence only - the same negligent way that I was raised - and I realize that millions more are still going to be infected. Here. Today. In America. Because it is apparently too immoral to teach our young people about their bodies, their sexuality and how to protect themselves from a a viral infection that will kill them. Yes, it is a virus, not a bibical plague - a virus which can be prevented with a little medical science eduaction. Teaching abstinence only as a governmental policy is a deliberate misuse and disservice to millions of young people who deserve to have all the information available about active sexual behavior and the consequences of disease, without the trappings of a moralistic and judgemental Faith based education. our government is responsible to all citizens, not simply those of Christian belief and practice.

Today the statistics of AIDS infection remain alarming. Twenty-five miliion people are infected worldwide. 25,000,000! It seems that teaching abstinence does not stop young people form having sex - it only means they are ignorant of the deadly peril before them.

I have linked the title of this blog to the San Francisco Chronicle's special section of articles about AIDS and the disease's impact on communities around the world. Take some time. Read through the articles. Think about your children. Then act. Write your Congress persons and demand that that our communities be responsible to the science of health, not the morals.

If sex, and homosexuality, had been discussed in my home growing up would I be without the disease today? I can't know. But I do know that the relentless message, both spoken and unspoken, that premarital and homosexual sex was a sin so devesating as to separate me from God and my families love, completely prevented me from being able to talk about my sexuality, my lonliness, and my despair at being different - and started me on a clear path of secrecy and self-destruction that I must still battle some 37 years on... So, today, if you or I speak up and prevent one young woman or one young man from acquiring AIDS we will have made a start in stopping this virus from having one more life to destroy.