Thus the Moniker

Well, I've missed two days. No good excuse. Just difficult to make myself put down my thoughts. They all seem personal and private. Guess I should keep a diary instead.

Eros Binding the Hands of the Aged Centaur, After the Antique Greek Sculpture,
Donald W. Larson, oil on linen, 2001

Let's see. News. The daily battle with meds goes on. I mix the Fuzeon for two days at a time - four bottles for four injections. Plus about a dozen or more pills every night. Plus Mark's medicines. It seems completely overwhelming at times, and at the same time I know I'm one of the very lucky ones to have had the privilege of receiving these life saving drugs. I sound completely self-absorbed to complain about it at all. The downside of the medications is real, though. Witness the double necrosis of my femur heads and the two new titanium replacements. Almost assuredly a result of nearly sixteen years of anti-viral intake. Marks osteoporosis, his collapsed discs and surgery are due to the anti-virals as well. He's opted temporarily to go off the medication until his t-cells and viral load reach danger levels. When I lost my access to Fuzeon for four weeks - the cost of the co-pay is approximately $500.00 and was out of our reach - we watched my t-cells plummet. Much more than was expected for the short break. It was unnerving and a another good reason to stop complaining. The good people at Roche Pharmaceuticals helped me access their patient assistance program and the T20 flows again. I'll have a check-up this week to see if my immune system is bouncing back.

If I had been taught that I was worthwhile as a gay man and if I had learned about condoms would I still be in this predicament? It is a question I will never be able to answer. I do know that I taught my daughter that she is valuable as a person as she is created and that her health is worth protecting. Use a condom if you have sex before marriage. Period. It does not offer a guarantee, as refraining form sexual activity would, but it has a good record in preventing disease. That is what's important. I firmly believe knowledge of one's body and how to protect it are vital to living fully. I wish I had been taught that and reassured that I was important enough in the scheme of things to take care of all those years ago. I do think it would have made a difference.

As the religious right works to destroy my rights for equality under the law, and the rights of my family to exist as a legal entity, I wonder how many of their children will die because of the forced repression of the sexuality God gave them? Homosexuality is not an abhorration or a deviance from nature or God's handiwork. Rather, we have existed throughout the history of men in approximately the same percentages as far as can be told from historical records. It stands to reason for me that we are a normal divergence from the heterosexual which must exist as a stabilizing element of our joint humanity. We have a purpose to fulfill. Perhaps it allows us to focus on the arts, religion and the sciences without the distraction of maintaining a family - a task which I know from firsthand experience requires ones complete catalog of resources to provide and maintain to the detriment of all other pursuits. Perhaps, in our own way, we contribute to the advancement of our species by engaging in these higher pursuits and leave procreation to those for whom it is most suited. Or perhaps not. I will ask God one day why? Why be visited with a sexuality which is reviled, outlawed and spat upon by so many. What is the purpose of this gift - for it is I firmly believe a gift - if one is formally charged with burying, disowning, repenting and reviling this intrinsic part of ones being? I cannot believe God intends us to hate that part of us which He has made in His likeness. So, what is it for then? Is it simply the 'cross' I am given? I cannot think that a significant portion of the central core of my humanity is presented to me to be only a mortification. One rejoices in a gift for it celebrates the giver, in this case God, to do so.

Celibacy? It is taught that celibacy is also a gift. It is not a gift that I received. I could not have become who I am in life without my helpmate, Mark. He is my spouse in every true sense of the word. Companion. Comfort. Intimate. These are good and right things for which few, very few men and women are invested with the nobility to forbear.


The centaur, and particularly the centaur Chiron, are representative to me of the internal struggle for becoming a right and noble Christ centered man. You will find it interesting to visit http://ww2.netnitco.net/users/legend01/centaur.htm to see a discussion on the Christian metamorphous of the Greek being, and the dichotomy of spirit versus nature.

And, thus the moniker.