Christopher Macintosh

A friend has emailed me about the tragic suicide of yet another gay teen. It breaks my heart when I learn that a kid, trapped in a hostile environment, has felt that the hatred and intolerance he or she faces is more than they can take.

Gay teen suicide is one of the great tragedies of our time and one that is almost wholly preventable. These kids are not killing themselves because they feel they are perverted or that their “lifestyle” is empty and meaningless. They are killing themselves because they are told they are perverted; they are told their lifestyle is meaningless. They are beaten at school, attacked at home, ridiculed by family, and condemned from the pulpit. They listen to a message of hatred and intolerance disguised as love and when it is delivered over and over, when they are told enough times that they are worthless, they come to believe it.

Everytime a religious figure condenms homosexuality as unnatural and perverse, everytime a religious figure declares that gay people will burn in Hell for eternity, everytime a religious figure claims that any abuse suffered by a gay person is deserved, they have given the bashers the justification they desire to beat and often kill. They give the victims of their tyrades the message that suicide is the only answer because, for most of them, they know that heterosexuality is not the answer for them.

Every year, more and more scientific evidence points to the fact that homosexuality is NOT “curable,” that homosexuality itself, (not the behavior, but the orientation- at least among gay men) is not a choice. Research shows significant differences in the hypothalamae of gay men as opposed to straight men, that there is a correlation between orientation and the presence of the q28 gene in men, that gay men react to male phermones in the same way as straight women, that identical male twins raised in seperate environments will, in at least 95% of the time, both be gay if at least one is.

But, science is never an answer to those who seek in the Bible justification for bigotry and hatred. The Old Testament declares that adultery is a capital offence- why do those who condemn homosexuality not demand the death penalty for all those evangelists such as Richard Roberts who are divorced? Paul says in the New Testament that women should sit seperate from men in church, should never express religious opinions, and should always be subservient to their husbands. In even the most hardcore Baptist household, is this common?

We must stand up for those who are the most vulnerable and the least able to defend themselves from religious hypocrisy and cultural bigotry. We must stand up for the gay youth of America who are being beaten and murdered and driven to suicide by the ignorance and hatred of the deliberately blind.

I nearly killed myself when I was fourteen because of the verbal abuse of my stepfather. I know what our gay youth are going through. Stand up for them. Help them. Tell them they are beautiful and that the bigots and hate-mongers are wrong.

“Love In Action,” the “Christian,” “ex-gay” re-education camp to which young Zach Stark was recently consigned by his intolerant parents, has now been closed by the State of Tennessee. When even the founder of the group says that it doesn’t work and does more harm than good, I think that is a message that the bigots should listen to. But, then, when have bigots listened to anything other than that which supports their bigotry?

This is an Associated Press copyrighted article:

‘Ex-Gay Ministry’ Ordered Closed
by The Associated Press

(Nashville, Tennessee) The Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities has ordered the closing of what it calls two unlicensed personal care facilities run by a Christian group that claims to counsel gays to give up homosexuality.

Love In Action’s work, particularly with teenagers, has drawn protests from gay rights advocates.

Quagmire was 0ften the term used by opponents to describe the American involvement in Vietnam; but no, this is not going to be another cliched comparison with Iraq. Rather, this is about New Orleans and the money pit that is now opening up.

President Bush has announced that we will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild the Gulf coast, (New Orleans), at a time when we are already running hundreds of billlions of dollars in the red financing his War on Iraq. We must be very careful before we send politicians down there with barrels full of cash to make certain that this is not simply flushing money down the toilet or enriching a few at the expense of the many.

New Orleans is notorious as one of the most corrupt cities in the nation. The New Orleans police department has long been known to be rife with corruption. And, the incompetence of Mayor Ray Nagin is beyond dispute. Good Heavens! Last summer, Nagin announced to the city’s poor that if they were ever faced with evacuation, they were on their own as the city would not be able to evacuate them. Then, when the real thing hit, he sent bus drivers home the day of the hurricane to save money and told off-duty police not to show up until the day AFTER the hurricane! This is the kind of municipal administration to which we want to hand over billions of dollars?

Louisiana has a long and sordid history of corrupt politics. This is the state that continued to re-elect Edwin Edwards when he was under indictment, the man who said he would never lose an election unless he was found in bed with a dead woman or a live boy. He was eventually convicted of corruption, but it took years to do so.

However, let’s not focus our fears of corruption and incompetence just on New Orleans and Louisiana. Friends of the Bush Administration are already lining up at the trough. Joe Allbaugh ran George W’s 2000 election campaign, for which experience it was deamed he was qualified to run FEMA. After leaving FEMA and suggesting a political crony from Oklahoma to be his successor, (the infamous and incompetent Mike Brown), he became a lobbyist and, guess what? After the first major disaster, two companies he represents, Shaw Group and Halliburton, (yes, the same Halliburton Dick Cheney ran and which received billions in no-bid contracts in Iraq), have received no-bid contracts for initial relief work. People connected to both companies were also significant contributors to the Bush campaigns.

The record defecits we are now running, after years of surpluses under President Clinton, are primarily being financed by Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Communist China. We are spending tens of billions of dollars in interest on those loans. Do the American people want to give away billions of dollars to China every year?

The rebuilding of the Gulf Coast is going to be a financial quagmire and if someone isn’t careful, it’s mostly going to be wasted.

It has become quite popular for many GLBT people to describe themselves, and to presume to refer to anyone GLBT, as “queer.” We have the gay minstrel show on Bravo now called Queer Eye. Universities and colleges across America have instituted “Queer Studies” programs. Queer seems to be the accepted term now for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered.

I’m sorry, but I detest the term.

I am not queer. I am gay, I am homosexual, and not straight. But, I am not queer and I don’t like anyone, “queer” or not, calling me “queer.”

I find the term offensive and a reminder of the descrimination and violence we have suffered for too long. I have written of my stepfather calling me queer when I was a boy. I was beaten almost every day during junior high school. A young man was murdered in my city when I was a teen and the word “queer” written with his blood on the wall beside him.

“Queer” is symbolic of all the pain and degradation we have endured. I find it as offensive as “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” or “wop.” No university would institute a “Nigger Studies” program or offer classes in “Kike-history.” Why should “queer” be acceptable to us?

For that matter, why should a program such as “Queer Eye,” regardless of the title, be acceptable? “Queer Eye” is nothing more than the gay 21st-Century equivalent of “Amos and Andy.”

I know that some say that by embracing “queer,” we take the pain and hate from the word. No we don’t. Ask any African-American if they would tolerate ‘nigger” or if they embraced “niggger, would it take away the pain of centuries of slavery, lynchings, and descrimination. Ask a Jew if they would embrace “kike” as a way of alleviating the pain of the Holocaust and the Dyaspora.

For some, it is an “in-your-face,” “fuck-you” way of declaring independence from the descrimination and hate and I can understand the anger behind such feelings. Like every other middle-aged gay man, I have my copy of La Cage aux Folles and know all the words to “I Am What I Am.” But, I think there is a bit of exhibitionism in it, as well; a bit of wanting to shock. It’s similar to the tacky and tasteless exhibitionism often seen in Pride parades that negate any positive image that may be created. Wagging your penis at shocked straight people along the parade route is not going to influence them to be more receptive to gay marraige. All it does is declare that you care not for their feeings. If that’s all you want, then fine. However, some of us want more.

I am who I am and I am comfortable with who I am. I don’t need to walk up to a complete stranger on the street, slap his face, and scream, “I’m a cocksucker!” And, it’s not internalized homophobia to say so.

When you allow one aspect of your character or life to be the definition of who you are, you are pathetically mono-dimensional. And, the use of the word “queer” is an insulting and demeaning way of defining a group and often embraced by those for whom being gay is the over-riding quality of their being.

I am not queer, but I am proud that I have loved men and I was proud to march around the White House in protest against anti-gay descrimination. I was proud to work in the HIV community. I was proud to volunteer with The Quilt. I am proud to drive a car with a rainbow flag sticker. I am proud to write gay love stories. I am proud to speak to legislators and politicians about gay issues. I am proud to write letters to the newspaper regarding gay issues. I am proud to march in the Pride parade and to publicly declare my homosexuality.

But, I am not queer and don’t presume to call me queer.

It is hard to believe that the scenes of chaos, crime, and devastation emerging from what was once New Orleans are originating in the United States. How can something like this happen in America?

However, there are far more important questions to ask. For decades, indeed, for centuries, the authorities have known that, eventually, the Big Hurricane was going to hit New Orleans, just as the authorities in Los Angeles and San Francisco know that, eventually, the Big Earthquake is going to hit their cities, and the authorities of Washington and New York city know that, eventually, the Big Terrorist Attack is going to hit their cities. Everytime a hurricane enters the Gulf of Mexico, there is talk of what might happen if New Orleans is hit, or sideswiped. What happens if the storm-surge flows over the dikes and levees? What happens if one or more of the levees should rupture? Every single time there is a hurricane in the Gulf, these questions are discussed in the media.

It was known when Katrina hit Miami as a Category One hurricane that it was going into the Gulf. This was a week before it hit New Orleans, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Mobile. It was known the Tuesday before it hit that New Orleans would be, at the very least, on the western side of the storm. It was suspected Wednesday and Thursday that New Orleans would receive a direct hit. It was understood Saturday night that IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN.

Were there no contingency plans in place for this kind of disaster? Did the authorities know that a mandatory evacuation would not result in the entire city leaving? Was there no thought to the hundred thousand or so people who were simple too poor, too infirm, to leave? Was there no consideration given to the possibility that the levees might actually break?

When it became certain late last week that New Orleans WOULD suffer some kind of hit, why wasn’t the National Guard mobilized BEFORE the storm hit? Why wasn’t the Army mobilized to bring trucks, buses, supplies, food, and medicine in anticipation of the human misery that THEY KNEW was about to occur?

To this day, why hasn’t the Federal Government comandeered every Greyhound bus it can find and move these people out of the city? Why aren’t there fifty thousand troops patrolling the streets of New Orleans? Why is this happening in the greatest nation on earth?

Perhaps, the planning for this was left to those in the Pentagon who planned for Iraq AFTER the “end of major combat operations.”

It is telling that the Swiss newspaper Le Temps reports that funds had been appropriated to strengthen the levees around New Orleans, but the funds were deverted to help fund Bush’s War on Iraq. Why?

More questions:

Why is the primary port for oil tankers bringing petroleum into the United States located in the most hurricane prone port in America?

Why are refineries located in the most hurricane prone part of the country? Why is the unrefined petroleum not sent to more reliable areas of the nation?

And, finally…

If this is what we can expect after a hurricane hits New Orleans, what will happen when Al-Quaeda releases Ebola in Washington or explodes a dirty bomb in the port of Long Beach or sabotages a chemical plant outside Philadelphia or a nuclear plant in Illinois?

I certainly feel confident. I’m sure glad that the President decided to cut short his vacation two days AFTER the devastation.

Welcome to America in the Twenty-first Century.

As I watch the television coverage of the horrifying devastation and suffering in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I hear repeated by many people interviewed a recuring theme: gratitude to God for sparing them. I am paraphrasing, but several times, I have heard people say that if it weren’t for God’s grace, they would have died; that if it weren’t for God’s help, their home would have been destroyed; that had God not intervened, they would have lost their family.

I am profoundly confused and disturbed by such comments. Before I go further, I must say that I have great respect for those who are sincere in their faith and I mean no disrespect to them. A number of my friends are people of faith and I certainly do not mean anything insulting to them or to their brothers and sisters in faith when I ask, Why?

In every great moment of trauma, whether it is a natural disaster, a crime, an act of war, personal illness, or financial difficulty, one often hears comments to the effect that were it not for God, it could have been worse. However, my question is this. If God is all-powerful and all-merciful, if one thanks God for not allowing the disaster, illness, crime, etc., from becoming worse, why show gratitude? If God had the power to show mercy and spare some, why did he permit it in the first place?

Did God cause the disaster, illness, crime, etc.? If not, did he, indeed, have the power to make it less severe? If God had the power to make it less severe, why did he permit it at all? What kind of God permits the Holocaust? What kind of God allows a mother to watch the BTK killer disembowel her son? What kind of God permits horrors, agonies, the unspeakable to occur? And, why ask him in his infinite mercy to spare some or to give strength to survive the catastrophe he has either caused or allowed to occur?

And, why should I want to worship and venerate such a God? Why should I honor a God who would throw me into the pits of Hell for not believing in him, a God so egotistical that he would punish for eternity someone who chooses not to believe or to follow?

Why would anyone want to believe in such a foul power?

I shake my head in wonder when I hear the emotional and pseudo-intellectual gymnastics believers endure as they attempt to explain the inexplicable. God works in mysterious ways. We must just accept and have faith. Why?

Can someone please tell me why?

One night, when I was fourteen, I was standing in the kitchen of our house as my mother cowered at the table and my step-father stood in the doorway from the dining room yelling, “I’m not gonna have any God-damned queers in my family.” It was the spring of 1972 and my “sin,” the catalyst for this incident, was my having watched an ABC Movie of the Week entitled That Certain Summer, in which a teenage boy played by Scott Jacoby learns that his father, played by Hal Holbrook, is gay and living with a partner played by Martin Sheen. The movie showed the pain the revelation causes the boy and his attempts to understand and deal with it. I was just coming to terms, that spring, with the fact that I was turned on by the boys in the showers in gym class and not by the naked women in the Playboys I had removed from the neighbors’ trash cans. In watching the movie, I saw that there were gay men out there who didn’t commit suicide, who didn’t lurk in alleys, and who didn’t go to prison. I saw that there might be hope for me.

Until my step-father’s outburst of loathing and disgust.

Two hours later, I was seated on the toilet in the bathroom holding my Boy Scout knife to my wrist, desperately trying to work up the courage to end the pain and the “perversion.” Were it not for the insistent knocking on the door by my younger brother, I might very well have done so.

This summer, a teenage boy in Tennessee named Zack Stark caused a great stir when he wrote in his blog of his homosexuality and his parents’ determination to “cure” it by sending him to a Christian “ex-gay” re-education camp called Refuge, run by a ministry called “Love in Action.” There was outrage at the techniques used by the group and protests both on the Internet and in front of the group’s headquarters. The State of Tennessee even invistigated the camp over allegations of abuse and practicing therapy without proper certification. Zack has now returned home from the re-education camp and his latest blog entry, as quoted by The Washington Blade, indicates that there has been some “progress” made by the re-programmers at Love in Action. It is understandable. The boy is sixteen and under great stress caused by parents who cannot accept a son who is not what they want.

I understand the feelings of shame, the sense of alienation at not being what your family wants. An older family-member had occasionally touched me inappropriately when I was young and later, seeing the turmoil and emotional violence in my family after my mother’s remarriage, had asked that I live with him and his wife. My mother refused and told me that, had she agreed to it, I would have been “ruined.” I wasn’t completely certain what she meant by the term “ruined,” but had a fairly good idea that it had something to do with being “queer,” which I knew I was. So, I endured the rest of my adolescence knowing that, in my mother’s eyes, I was ruined.

Larry Evans was the founder of “Love in Action” in 1973. However, after seeing the wreckage “reparative therapy” leaves in its wake, the destroyed lives, the self-hatred, the suicides, he has now denounced it and declared it to be dangerous and wrong.

More than a third of teenage suicides are by gay youth. Do they kill themselves because of their homosexuality or because of the alienation, the rejection, the abuse they endure at the hands of unaccepting families and closed-minded bigots? There is little evidence to suggest much of a success rate in programs such as “Love in Action,” which some of their organizers admit, even as they use fear of the “homosexual agenda” in their fund-raising; but there is voluminous evidence to show the harm such programs do in creating feelings of shame and failure in the victims they target.

I have only the greatest respect and sympathy for Zach, a beautiful young man, as you can see from the picture above, who deserves all the peace and joy life can give. I hope he finds love and self-acceptance, no matter what path he chooses once he is of age to make decisions for himself. And, I hope that advocates either for “reparative therapy” or against leave the boy alone and let him deal with his life. He’s been under terrible stress and deserves support and love.

The picture above is part of a map of Mars drawn by the Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli in the 1870’s. It shows the famous oceans and canals of Mars, which many believed were evidence of an advanced civilization on the Red Planet. His observations served as the basis for H. G. Wells’ famous novel, The War of the Worlds, as well as many other works of fiction. In fact, many astronomers were firmly convinced for decades, by Shiaparelli’s observations and their own, that Mars had canals and had, at least once, harbored a great civilization.

The problem was, Shiaparelli never said there were canals on Mars.

The astronomer wrote that he had observed canali, an Italian word that could be translated into English as “canals,” but which is more properly translated as “channels,” something completely different and which sheds an entirely new light on the subject.

Of course, since the first photographs from the Mariner 4 space probe in 1965, we have known that Mars is not the lush world of oceans and channels that once it had been thought to be. Instead, it is a cold and barren, dusty and windblown world of Moon-like craters and vast plains, occasionally marred by a few huge, deep canyons that once had served as conduits of water, though not for billions of years.

The point is that, even in contemporary times, a simple mistranslation of one word, led generations of scientists and writers to believe, indeed to base their life’s work on, the premise that Mars had canals and, thus, evidence of advanced intelligent life. The mistranslation of one word.

I am a freethinker and, thus, probably not the best person to discuss issues of faith. However, I find it amazing that fundamentalist Christians are so eager to believe the Bible is the inspired word of God and factually and dogmatically infallible when one must consider that many of the events described in both the Old and New Testaments were written of decades or even centuries after they allegedly took place. Many of the documents that Christians now call the Bible were gathered together and debated in various councils and conventions during the early centuries of the church. Some gospels were dismissed, others were accepted, based on the political conditions existing in the Roman Empire and the church at the time. And, the translations of some documents from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek, into later forms of those languages or into Latin could contain misinterpretations of words and phrases with far greater consequences than those of the astronomers who relied on the erroneous translations of Shiaparelli’s work.

John Shelby Spong, the former Episcopal bishop of Newark, New Jersey, writes in his book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1991), that part of the popular interpretation of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah is based on the translation of one word which could be translated in seven different ways. (More on this in a later post).

Even if one does believe in a great and benevolent power guiding the universe, is it not too much to believe that human error in translating documents over centuries could occur, that stories passed down from one generation to the next by word-of-mouth could be changed and altered by the time they are placed on paper or papyrus? Even if one does believe in the basic foundations of Judaism and Christianity, is it not just a bit too much to believe that every single word of the Bible is absolutely and undeniably correct?

If not, may I offer you a deed to some canals I have for sale on Mars.

The odyssey that led me from confident, even cocky, schoolboy with a bright future to middle age and seeking to rebuild my life has been rocky and circuitous and can serve as a lesson that self-esteem cannot be built upon the whims and opinions of others. The psychologist Nathaniel Branden, in The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, (New York: Bantam, 1994), writes that self-esteem is the belief that one is capable of meeting life’s challenges and deserving of life’s rewards. Mic Hunter, in Abused Boys: The Neglected Victims of Sexual Abuse, (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991), describes how abuse can destroy self-esteem in children and adolescents. I was a happy and academically successful child until the death of my father and the four dreadful years thereafter. Surviving sexual, physical, and emotional abuse both at home and at school, by my late adolescence, I had lost both the hope that I might have a successful life and the belief that I deserved it. I sank into a miasma of self-destruction in college from which I have begun to escape only in my forties.

My recovery began with a spiritually-based program and fellowship, but my first steps were difficult and saw many setbacks. I tried to accept the concept of a Higher Power upon whom I could rely for my recovery, but my doubts about faith and religion repeatedly scuttled my early efforts. Following the program’s advice to “fake it ’till you make it,” I pretended for years to believe; yet I continued to relapse into my chemical abuse.

In college, I read a number of works by the writer and philosopher Ayn Rand, including The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and two collections of essays on her philosphy of “rational self-interest,” For the New Intellectual, (New York: New American Library, 1964), and Philosophy: Who Needs It, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982). Though I have some problems with her philosophy and many of her followers, I re-read some of her work during my early recovery and, surprisingly, it was the third essay in that second book, “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” which proved to be the key to opening my eyes and giving me the strength to begin a true and healthy recovery from chemical abuse.

Even as an adolescent considering the Episcopal ministry, I knew underneath my attempts at belief that there was no God and that people turn to the irrationality of religion because of their own weaknesses and fears. However, Rand explains why one of the foundations of spiritually-based recovery programs, the so-called “Serenity Prayer,” is, despite its form as a prayer, a rather rational tool to use in recovery. Written by Reinhold Neibuhr, an evangelical Congregationalist thinker and writer, it reads

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Reading this essay opened my eyes to the profoundly comforting idea that recovery could work without a belief in God and that I could achieve recovery on my own. When trapped in addiction, one often tries to change those things that are not within one’s power to change; one often lacks the courage to change those things that must be changed; and, often, one fails to understand the difference. It was after reading that essay, (which I have criminally simplified here), that I began to realize that I could not rely on superstition and wishful thinking to achieve recovery. It was my own effort and rationality that was going to do it; and it has.

My life is not perfect and I still have great difficulties and challenges. However, I remain clean and sober and I am seeing some success with my writing. Life is good, even when it isn’t.