Tag Archives: homosexuality

Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of the time that we suffer. — André Aciman

This is what a gay high school boy looked like in 1979.

I like gay romance in print and on film. The positive portrayal of romance and intimacy between two men or high school boys is lovely. Gay youth and men exist and have the same need for love and companionship as the heterosexual majority. Especially given that in Western society, intimacy between men was criminalized for a long time–it was considered “gross indecency” and punishable by imprisonment. Beyond that, public prejudice was prevalent throughout the 20th century. I remember it well. Recently, I met up with a man I knew in high school. We had not seen each other since graduation in 1980. We met through a mutual friend and ex of mine. I had no idea that my high school buddy was gay. We are both in our sixties and retired. I am happily partnered, and he is single. It was good to see him again.

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Olivier said that drama is an affair of the heart, or it’s nothing, and he was right. — Pam Gems

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Joe Locke and Kit Connor as Charlie and Nick in Heartstopper.

I watched season two of the charming Netflix series Heartstopper. I liked it despite it being aimed at a much younger audience. What drew me to the series was the gay storyline; the romance between the two protagonists, the high school boys Nick and Charlie. The series is a drama, although it pulls its punches. The boys never go past kissing and cuddling in their relationship. Also, Nick is bisexual, and Charlie is gay. It is cute and appealing to its teenage audience. I like that a teenage gay romance is portrayed as a positive thing. Coincidentally, the actors who play Nick and Charlie are, like the characters they play, gay and bisexual. Kit Connor, who plays Nick, declared his bisexuality. Joe Locke, who plays Charlie, is openly gay. That the young actors are gay and bisexual is interesting. It is nice that they are free to be themselves.

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It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight. — Edward Abbey

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Humans are a sexually dimorphic species. They come in two sexes: male and female, and I appreciate and celebrate the difference. I like men. What is not to enjoy about men? That said, having seen journal articles and YouTube videos giving detailed instructions on how gay men can interact with a transman’s pussy (to use the vernacular), I am puzzled at the absurdity of the claims.

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Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. ― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

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Listening to a true believer in gender identity and gender expression explain why they believe reminds me of when I was a pious Roman Catholic. I am sure I sounded much the same to non-believers when I explained why I had taken the leap of faith to practice Roman Catholicism. I accepted the theological arguments, the authority of Scripture, and the Apostolic Tradition that compose Roman Catholicism. I attended mass daily, said my prayers, and tried to do good and avoid doing evil. I regularly examined my conscience and tried to turn away from sin. It was reasonable to me at the time. Though I tried to be true to my faith, lingering doubt remained. Eventually, I realized that I could not continue as it was hypocritical of me. I stopped going to mass. I no longer believe in the claims of Christianity.

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People have gone down this spiral of cancel culture and the idea that everything is offensive. — Bianca Del Rio

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Jason and I are good friends and hunting buddies.

Here is a photo of my friend and hunting buddy Jason and me. Jason is a family man and a man’s man; he is happily married and has a six-year-old daughter. Not long after we became hunting buddies some years ago, I told him I am gay. His response was, “and that will affect our hunting how?” Since then, our friendship and hunting partnership flourished. It was under Jason’s guidance I took up whitetail deer hunting. Hitherto, I was first and foremost a gamebird hunter. Upon taking up deer hunting with Jason as my mentor, I took four deer to date, starting in the 2012 season with a nice doe, a nine-point buck in 2016, a spike horn buck in 2017, and an eight-point buck in 2020. As a result, I have a presence online as a gay hunter. I publish a blog, Geoffrey’s Hunting Diary, subtitled “memoirs of a gay huntsman.” In addition, I have a YouTube channel called The Gay Huntsman. Those who view my videos and read my blog posts find the emphasis on hunting and not that I am gay. Yes, Jason gets it; my sexual orientation is irrelevant–it has no bearing on our shared passion for hunting and our friendship. Continue reading →

Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination. — Christian Nestell Bovee

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Though I always knew I was gay, it was not until the spring of 1989 that I accepted the reality. It was after a weekend visit with my friend and confessor, Father Basil Zion, a Russian Orthodox priest on the faculty of Religious Studies at Queen’s University, my alma mater. It was Father Basil who convinced me I should be true to myself. With newfound confidence, I took my first tentative steps out of the closet. I did not declare my homosexuality to the world at large. I made my first visit to the GO Centre, the gay community centre in Ottawa at the time. I started reading the local gay newspaper. Things were off to a good start, but my confidence took a hit when I read an article in the newspaper on a murder trial in Texas that sent a chill down my spine. In December 1988, Richard Lee Bednarski, an 18-year-old college student, was convicted of the murder of two gay men, Tommy Lee Trimble, 34, and Lloyd Griffin, 27. Berdanski was sentenced to thirty years in prison for his crime. It looked as though justice was seen to be done at face value–even though his crime merited a life sentence. However, in handing down his judgement, District Judge Jack Hampton openly expressed his disdain for the victims as they were gay.

In Hampton’s view, the fact that the victims were gay made it a lesser degree of murder. That and their killer was a good boy, a college student with no criminal record–it was only his first murder after all. He reached his conclusion despite the evidence that “he (Bednarski) and a group of North Mesquite High School students drove to Dallas’ Oak Lawn area to harass homosexuals the night of May 15.” The motive for his crime was the harassment of gay men. (AP News) As Hampton mused following the trial,

″These two guys that got killed wouldn’t have been killed if they hadn’t been cruising the streets picking up teen-age boys. […] I don’t much care for queers cruising the streets picking up teen-age boys […] I’ve got a teen-age boy. […] These homosexuals, by running around on weekends picking up teen-age boys, they’re asking for trouble. […] They really are.” (AP News)

The news report was a grim reminder that many still view gay men as predators who target adolescent boys for sex. As I said in previous posts, growing up gay, the onus on gay men my age was to prove to the broader society we are not perverts. Yes, the stigma of being a gay man lingered well into the 1980s. In fact, in 1980, when I served as a Reservist in the Canadian Army, I remember a fellow Reservist who spoke openly about going with friends to “roll the faggots” at Majors Hill Park in Ottawa. Also, in the spring and summer of 1989, several men were murdered in Ottawa. Their attackers killed them because they thought they were gay. At least one of the murdered men was not gay, not that it matters. The police investigated the murders, and charges were laid against the assailants who went to prison.

Looking back, I was not comfortable accepting my homosexuality as living with the stigma of being a gay man remained a heavy burden. Over time, however, through the hard work of brave gay individuals and the gay rights and human rights groups who supported them, gay men threw off the stigma. Life is good for gay men these days, but they should not forget their troubled history. As free and equal citizens, we must focus on our issues as gay men and not allow our movement to become diluted with causes, notably feminism and transgenderism, that have no bearing on our history and the present. As we exercise our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, certainly we can sympathize with those around us but not at the expense of our interest in the consolidation of the gains of the gay rights movement.

Posted by Geoffrey

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. ― H.L. Mencken

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Geoffrey out duck hunting.

The words “gun lobby” and “gun nut” are slurs invented by prohibitionists–people opposed to gun ownership and hunting–to besmirch the character of gun owners and hunters. I heard the term “gun nut” used on American television sitcoms like “All in the Family” as early as the 1970s. I shrugged it off at the time as inconsequential. I had no reason to believe as a boy that there was anything wrong with gun ownership and hunting. I remember how other children brought things like duck wings for show and tell in kindergarten and primary school. Wings taken from the wild ducks that their older brothers and fathers shot while out hunting. Other children proudly told the class about their fathers, who had returned from successful big game hunts. My dad and my uncle enjoyed hunting cottontail and jackrabbits when I was a boy. It was not until late in 1989, following the mass shooting at the engineering school at the University of Montreal that I first heard mention of the “gun lobby” used as a pejorative term in public parlance. It came as an unwelcome surprise. Continue reading →

Sing if you’re glad to be gay, sing if you’re happy that way. — the Tom Robinson Band

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Robinson

An accusation was levelled at me last year when I publicly rejected the notion that gay became “queer.” The charge, in short, is that I am a selfish gay man. Now that gay rights are secured–the removal of the stigma of being gay, the freedom to live openly, to participate fully in society, and the right to marry among them–I am content to “pull the ladder up after me.” That I reject “queer theory” is true; I made no secret of that. In particular, I object to the conflation of the transgender ideology with male homosexuality–notably gay rights advocacy. In a recent essay, I discussed the emergence of a movement called the LGB Alliance–an initiative to separate the T from the LGB. The problem I found with the LGB Alliance is that it is part of a struggle among feminists–a quarrel over whether transgender women are women or not and if there is a place for transgender women in the feminist movement. I stand by what I wrote in my earlier essay: feminist causes have no bearing on gay men’s issues, no more than does the transgender ideology. The gay rights movement and transgender ideology are unrelated and neither the twain should meet. Continue reading →

The counterculture is always repackaged and made into a product. It’s part of America. — Jim Jarmusch

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The history of the gay rights movement in the United States is fascinating. Is it a civil rights movement or is it a social justice movement? Is gay a demographic or is gay a community? Are gay rights the drive for civil rights, that gay people be at liberty, as individuals, to participate in society, openly, and free from persecution? Is it a social justice movement, the gay community driven by a countercultural constituency, intent on separating itself from mainstream culture? The answer to these questions is the gay rights movement in the United States is a combination of the two perspectives. To date, the successes of the gay rights movement in the United States are laudable. The repeal of laws that criminalized homosexual sex is a significant gain. Gay people live openly and are free to marry. True, elements of anti-gay prejudice linger, mainly from the ranks of the religious and socially conservative; moreover, there is only a patchwork of laws in place across the 50 states that prohibit discrimination in employment on the grounds of sexual orientation. However, I think these are the least of the worries for the gay rights movement in the United States. While both perspectives, civil rights and social justice, contributed to the success of the gay rights movement; what most concerns me about the current state of the gay rights movement in the United States is the influence of a decidedly countercultural constituency of U.S. society on the gay rights movement. In my opinion, this only undermines the successes of the gay rights movement in the United States and hinders its progress as a civil rights movement. Continue reading →

If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things? — Antonin Scalia

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chechnya

Disturbing reports are cropping up on various news sites concerning a pogrom against gay men in Chechnya carried out under the auspices of the Chechen government. Initial reports from Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta claimed scores of men under suspicion of being gay were detained by Chechen authorities and three reported killed. Details are sketchy, and the Chechen government denied these reports calling them “absolute lies and disinformation.” (as cited in the Guardian) As yet it is hard to know what is going on, but as Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, Russia project director for the International Crisis Group, noted:

I have heard about it happening in Grozny [the Chechen capital], outside Grozny, and among people of very different ages and professions. […] The extreme taboo nature of the subject meant that much of the information was arriving second or third hand, and as yet there are no fully verifiable cases. […] It’s next to impossible to get information from the victims or their families, but the number of signals I’m receiving from different people makes it hard not to believe detentions and violence are indeed happening. (as cited in the Guardian)

For me, these reports coming from Chechnya come as a troubling reminder that despite the gains of gay rights movements in the Western World, notably the decriminalization and destigmatization of male homosexuality, gay men remain a population reviled by various cultural and religious elements in societies across the world. Continue reading →