It teared me up a bit. For all she knew, she was dealing with a leper. What she saw, though, was a problem that needed fixing. She saw useful work in front of her. She felt the terror of this young man and felt compassion for him, then had the balls to do something about it. She was the only one in that mass of people seeing a human being in pain.
This, in a nutshell, is my ideal of a hero. They are the ones who see what others don’t, and do what others cannot imagine.
And I was thinking I can have multiple ideas of gayness. This is the beauty of freedom, of the capacity to change my mind, or to allow multiple simultaneous strands of opinion.
I can say I have met bitchy emotionally demanding gays, and I don’t like them.
I know, as an historical study, that gays into S&M played an important role in Hitler’s SS. This is, or seems to be, a common feature where severe cruelty is involved.
I look at the use of an 11 year old boy as a sex object in a gay bar. Can there be any doubt that, if he has not already lost his virginity, he will well before he is 15, most likely to a much older man? Whatever “parental units” may be in play would presumably have no objection.
But then I think of this poor young man dying, forsaken by his mother for his alleged “sin”. And I feel compassion. My own cousin was disowned by my aunt and uncle for the same “crime”. And he was and presumably still is (I am largely disconnected from my family) a Christian preacher.
There has to be a middle ground. There has to be a place where I am able to say: “some of what you do is to me weird, even while I grant that much of what some heterosexuals do I also find weird. Most people are weird, and I include myself in that. I am not fully convinced you are not acting out a trauma of some sort that has become bonded with your sexuality. I am not fully convinced you can or should be foster or adoptive parents. But I recognize you as a fellow suffering human, one who, like me, is confused by all this, who is doing with their brief life what seems to make sense, while lacking all the clues to ultimately solve the puzzle.”
And I would be willing to listen to what they say in response. Lord knows I have plenty of practice being yelled at, so that would not bother me. It doesn’t even anger me much any more, no matter how extreme it is.
But this is how helpful, useful, peaceful, and ultimately harmonious cultural evolution happens. Gays are not monolithic. They obviously–like every other group–include many opinions. I knew a gay man who was traumatized by his first and only trip to a gay bathhouse, which he found disgusting. There are gays like Rupert Everett who have gone on record saying that most gay men should not be raising children, and paid a price for it. He must have suspected that might be the reaction, so that was most likely an act of courage on his part, like his previous act of being flamboyantly and proudly gay in public long before it was really mainstream.
I use the example of gays here, but it could be expanded to blacks, women, transgender people, Hispanics and all the other categories the Left tried to make immutable, monolithically uniforn, and radically separate in their propaganda. They don’t want “us”–different groups–talking, because were we to do so openly and honestly, in the spirit of the true American tradition, we would find we have vastly more in common than in difference.
I will append two comments.
One: the bad guy in the new Aquaman looks just like the Nordic/Aryan original blonde Aquaman. I don’t think any of the writers wanted us to forget that there was an ethnic tinge to the new Aquaman, and even though the script was a jumble–where they obviously at some point just said “fuck it, people will come see Momoa, and we have some great fight sequences–I think they simultaneously wanted an environmental message, and a message of white imperialism, with the other king having red hair.
Second: I was talking with a guy from Flint, Michigan, who told me he had been told by a cop that the main problem there was horrific leadership, and that the main factor there was placing race above competence. Obviously, there are highly competent black people out there–Ben Carson, for example–but not all black people are competent. Neither are all white people. You have to look at individuals as individuals. If the bar is the race of your birth, that bar is much too low. We should not be surprised when thieves and scoundrels abuse such ridiculous trust.
Actually, I will parse the phrase Individual for a moment. Can I write it out as Me/others? Is the sum 1, or am I to be reduced by my group? For a true Notdividable, they are not reduced in this process. This is of course an ideal, since obviously all of us are highly influenced to a greater degree than we can likely see (as we might logically deduce) by others. Still, the world works better when we get as many eyes and minds on it as possible. Not all are equal, but all are potentially useful. All matter, at the most basic level of theory and law. All citizens, to be clear.
This is the foundational idea of our political system. We place our trust in a system of immutable (in theory, obviously not in practice) laws–which should in my view be seen as written in stone like the original Roman laws of their Res Publica–as administered by people whose offices depend on periodic votes of confidence by all Americans who take an interest in our system, and in the process of their own government.