God has no religion

So much for tolerance

Jay Claydon of the Sydney Convicts [Pic The Age/SMH]

Ppl keep on saying that being gay is tolerated now, and things are improving, yadda yadda.  And so they are.   Somewhat.  But even in tolerant civilised New Zealand  ...

It started with whispers in the change rooms and ended with a call from his coach.

At 18, Jay Claydon had told close friends and family he was gay. They accepted him. But inside his rugby club, he didn't feel safe coming out. He was right to be fearful.

"At training one night, people were looking at me funny. Somehow they'd found out.

"On the Friday night, I got a call from my coach saying the players had taken a vote at a meeting behind my back and they weren't comfortable having me in the team any more. He said, 'they don't want you to come back.' "

[Read more here]

 How cruel.  How vile.  How horrible.  How it reminds me of my youth.  

Pigs.

Who beds whom

‘As I grow older and older,

 And totter toward the tomb,

 I find that I care less and less,

 Who goes to bed with whom.’”

Dorothy Sayers

Equality

From Hunk du Jour

Gay Hatred

Serendipity

Serendipity. Isn't it a wonderful word! Good old Horace Walpole and the eighteenth century enlightenment.

In this case, I meant that I find wonderful things when I start researching for the posts I write. Mostly -- though not always -- I'm looking for pictures to go with my rants. But as the Wikipedia item on serendipity says, an informed search, that is, one where you can see the usefulness and relevance of pictures or articles even if Google hasn't done the linkages for you, makes for some very satisfying discoveries.

I was looking for an image to go with my May-September Relationships piece, and I came across this website, a collection of images on non-western homosexuality.

A few thoughts popped into my head when I found it. First, it is a common lie from the Christian-Fascists that homosexuality is a western evil, introduced to noble savages by our degenerate culture. The images (and other work) suggest that the opposite is true: homophobia is the evil introduced by us into more primitive societies.


Consider for example the picture of the of the oh-so-Christian conquistadors murdering "sodomites". The brave Spanish soldiers are having a bit of a party, murdering evil gays. Look at their insouciant, even joyful attitudes. What fun it all is, to be sure. In Reay Tannahill's Sex in History, she describes how many pre-Columban cultures were tolerant of homosexuality. In one culture from meso-America, a young man was given a male slave to satisfy his hormonal urges on reaching adolescence. The big no-no wasn't gay sex, it was fathering a child with an inappropriate woman, because that created all kinds of obligations for the family. Better to let him get his rocks off with a young man. One wonders whether the scion of the family and his slave ended up fond of each other.

This familial reason for promoting adolescent homosexuality is probably one of the reasons the Greeks tolerated and even encouraged the pattern of a young man being taken in hand by an older to show him how to be a man -- a bisexual man -- something Mary Renault uses to great effect in her novels set in Ancient Greece. After all, the Greeks also exposed babies to control population.

So we have the thoroughly decent and endearing Spanish conquistadors murdering evil sodomites and then we also have a photograph of a indigenous American vase in the shape of two men fucking. You know, I think I'll just pop down to Target and get an anal sex jug. So much for homosexuality being a western import! (Reay Tannahill also says that the priests of the new imposed religion in Spanish America were always asking their parishioners to tell them during confession whether they'd had sex in the "proper vessel" -- the Indians used heterosexual anal sex as a birth-control device)


The next thought that struck me was one I've often mentioned: that in a world where it doesn't matter whether you have sex with your own or the "opposite" gender, bisexuality would be normal and widespread. Have a look at the charming picture of the Threesome in India, the glorious peacock eyes of all three participants, the one man up the other who is in turn fucking the woman. I love the way they have taken off all their clothes except their headdress. I love also the sublime looks on all their faces. Glorious.








The final thought was that perhaps May-September relationships are historically all too common. Look at the utterly charming painting of the Sheik and his boy enjoying a party in the garden. Maybe I should have chosen this image to illustrate my May-September piece.

Final point: it seems to me that the more you look, the more you dig, the more you find that gay and bisexual is universal, throughout all cultures and all times. And that when Judeo-Christianity is absent, mostly it's tolerated and in some cases even welcomed.

This is Oz

A website dedicated to speaking up for a more inclusive society in Australia.

Some lovely photos here. I've chosen the one from the fully sick rapper to show you. He's straight but he bothered to do something. Good on him! But there are plenty of other images.

It's all happening, people. We shall overcome, never doubt it.

Judge not lest ye be judged

In Greek: me krinete hina me krithete.

Literally, 'do not judge' (again and again, i.e., simple imperative) 'lest you be judged' (passive aorist subjunctive, i.e., judged once, implying, in other words, when you appear before God. In other words, not quite so cuddly as I thought.

'Me' is μη, i.e. 'mu eta', pronounced like 'meh' in English, but with a longer vowel. It means 'not' in commands and injunctions. And 'hina' (ινά -- I can't find a character to show the' rough breathing' or h in Greek which should be at the beginning of the word) survives in Modern Greek as 'na', and it means 'so that'. Thelo na erkhomai = I want to go, in Modern Greek,which would be not that different in classical Greek, though the pronunciation has shifted.

My head is filled with useless shit.

Give me strength!

Two pointers showing just how much road we still have to travel to acceptance.

Firstly, from the UK. EastEnders, as I'm sure you all know, is a rather good soapie set in London's east end, traditionally a working class area. Recently, they've added a gay storyline to the many threads held together in the traditional soap opera format. And the actor playing the gay character gets catcalls and boos when he goes out in public. Give me strength! Of course, there's the stupidity which confuses a character and his actor. This isn't kindergarten, my sweets. But even to comment like that, whether or not the actor himself is gay or bi (and who gives a flying foo foo valve?), shows how much further we still have to go to get to the easy-going situation where it quite literally doesn't matter what your sexuality is. Here's the Daily Mail's report.



Then, in sunny Oz, Jason Akermanis, previously thought to be gay-friendly, produced this gem:

Football clubs are very different environments. Locker room nudity is an everyday part of our lives and unlike any other work place. I believe it would cause discomfort in that environment should someone declare himself gay.

Good grief. Get over yourselves, footy players. So not coming out makes it different? How do you know that given the normal (so to speak) gay ratio, 1 bloke in 10 of your teammates isn't surreptitiously ogling your bum, Jasie? Never mind the bisexuals, who might (o tempora! o mores!) deceive you by having a girlfriend yet still perve on your pecs?

How... pathetic.