tridd forums

Welcome to the new "Reconciliation Forum," which is a place for which I have great hopes and high expectations. In this forum, we can freely discuss fears about coming out, or other acceptance issues -- involving gays and straights, or gays and religion, among other things. To kick things off, I've written a short piece about reconciling within our own community (the gay v/s gay conflict). I hope you enjoy it.
Peace and love-- Troy
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Who we are

Beginning almost with the first day I appeared in East Texas two short years ago, I’ve been told time after time after time that gays must remain invisible here. Moving from coastal North Carolina, it was as though I had entered an alternate reality. “Things are just different here,” people said. But it wasn’t an alternate reality; it was a culture – a Right-Wing religious culture that preached hatred toward gays; and a gay culture that didn’t feel much better about itself…. “Trust me,” one friend once prophetically warned, “don’t be ‘out’ here. The gay community eats its young in East Texas.”

Over these past two years here, I’ve found an odd mixture of some of the warmest and most wonderful people on Earth, and also the injured and apparently mean-spirited types. Like wounded animals, we instinctively lash out at those trying to help us. I’ve seen people reaching out for help, and being bitten and clawed at for being “needy.” I’ve also seen people reaching out to help, and being bitten and clawed at for threatening the familiar comfort of isolation. And again I hear the warnings: “You can try to help me if you like… but challenge my sacred belief system at your own peril.”

But what, I ask, do we do when that “belief system” says we must remain silent and invisible? How can we help ourselves when our “new religion” states that things will never get better… that we will always eat our young here, and we must therefore always be alone?

The child becomes the parent, not so much because it was a good parent, but for the lack of any other example. We cannot help but become the parent, when the parent provides the only illustration of parenting we have available….

The same is true, I believe, of cultures. A culture maintains consistency over a period of time, not because it is true or correct or good or best… but because it lacks other examples. For better or for worse, a “culture” is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A newlywed couple was eating their first holiday ham at their first holiday dinner together, and the new husband asked his young wife why she had cut off and discarded the end of the ham before baking it.

“To tell you the truth,” she replied, “I’m not sure. My mother always cut off & discarded the end of our ham while we were growing up. I never thought about cooking a ham any other way.”

After the meal, the wife called her mother and asked the question of why their hams had always been so prepared.

“Oh honey,” answered her mother,” our oven was so tiny…. That’s the only way I could fit a ham into it.”

In East Texas, our cultural standards are set down in black and white, in Leviticus and in Romans, and interpreted and enforced by the dominant churches – clearly stating that it is unacceptable and damnable to exist as a gay person.

The East Texas gay culture springs from this dysfunctional belief system, which may go a long way toward explaining why so many of us agree that East Texas gays are among the meanest in the country.

We are a fractured group of children who have become our right-wing parents. Some remain closeted, self-loathing and pious, while others have become rebellious, inventing a new (but also flawed) piety to replace the one that condemned them. But the new piety is a religion of one -- it still has room to condemn the rest of the gay population. So we are kept separate and alone in our beliefs. We become bitter and lonely and, yes… mean. We sit alone and lash out at anyone who would challenge our “religion of one.”

Arthur Bloch (author of the “Murphy’s Law” series of books) said, "A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking." I believe we have grown weary and have drawn our conclusions. And to assure these can never be questioned by others, we have decreed that our conclusions are “sacred”.....

There’s an old Zen parable that goes something like this:

Someone said to Buddha,
"The things you teach, sir,
are not to be found in scripture."

"Then put them in there,"
said Buddha.

After an embarrassed pause
the man went on to say, "May I
be so bold as to suggest, sir,
that some of the things you
teach actually contradict the
scriptures?"

"Then the scriptures need amending,"
said Buddha.

I believe that too many scriptural interpretations have become "self-justifying facts." The Buddha story is wonderful, because it reminds us and empowers us to say, "that is not sacred," from which inevitably follows, "that is not true!"

Sure, God speaks through scripture, but his voice is most clearly heard in the wind, and in the static between radio stations.... I see it through our self-enforced isolation when I ask, “how is this working for us?”

The child becomes the parent, not so much because it was a good parent, but for the lack of any other example. But wait! There are other examples. We live in an age of information. We are beyond stasis. We have the ability to change – to will into being a new culture. And from the raw material of our own lives, we can will ourselves into being better parents -- who are compassionate and understanding.

Chinese writer and inventor Lin Yutang said, "Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence."

If you will walk with me down that road, together we can bring it into existence. We decide who we are.

Desmond Tutu Words and Inspiration

Many thank to Tam for lending me Tutu's book, "Believe," from which I've collected the following quotations...

From “Believe”

“If we could but recognize our common humanity, that we do belong together, that our destinies are bound up in one another’s, that we can be free only together, that we can survive only together, that we can be human only together, then a glorious world would come into being where all of us lived harmoniously together as members of one family, the human family.”

“We can be human only together.”

“Just show me your hands, what are you carrying in your hands? Show me! Show me, show me… Your ands are empty, you’ve got nothing! Why are they so scared of empty hands?... It is important for you to know that all moral right is on your side. Yes, you may be clobbered, yes, you may cry, you may get beaten… Some are still going to be detained. Some are still going to run the gauntlet of tear gas. Some are even going to die. Did you think it was figures of speech? When we said that in a struggle there are casualties, did you think it was figures of speech? It is not figures of speech. This is for real, this is real. And we have committed ourselves, we have committed ourselves to this struggle until freedom is won. But we shouldn’t behave like those who think this prize is just a cheap little prize. The prize for which we are striving is freedom, is freedom for all of us, freedom for those standing outside [the police], freedom for them! Because, you see, when we are free, when we are free, they will be here, they will be here, joining with us celebrating that freedom, and not standing outside there stopping us from becoming free… Now straighten up your shoulders, come, straighten up your shoulders like people who are born for freedom!

-- Extract from an address to shocked marchers who had escaped arrest at St George’s Cathedral after being surrounded by police and beaten with batons and whips. Over two hundred other marchers had been arrested. Tutu negotiated with police for the peaceful dispersion of the congregation. September, 1989.

[font=Century Gothic]We get most upset with those we love the most because they are close to us and we know that they are aware of our weaknesses… It only we could learn to live with our inadequacies, our frailties, our vulnerabilities, we would not need to try so hard to push away those who really know us.[/font]

[font=Courier New]We can love others with their failures when we stop despising ourselves because of our failures.[/font]

[font=Georgia]To be neutral in a situation of injustice is to have taken sides already. It is to support the status quo.[/font]

[font=Tahoma]At times of despair, we must learn to see with new eyes.[/font]

[font=Times New Roman]Forgiveness gives us the capacity to make a new start… And forgiveness is the grace by which you enable the other person to get up, and get up with dignity, to begin anew… In the act of forgiveness we are declaring our faith in the future of a relationship and in the capacity of the wrongdoer to change.[/font]

[font=Verdana]For true reconciliation is a deeply personal matter. It can happen only between persons who assert their own personhood and who acknowledge and respect that of others.[/font]

[font=Arial]Utter only the words of which we won’t be ashamed afterwards, which we won’t regret saying. It is easy to discourage, it is far too easy, all too easy to criticize, to complain, to rebuke. Let us try instead to be more quick to see even a small amount of good in a person and concentrate on that. Let us be more quick to praise than to find fault. Let us be more quick to thank others than to complain – “thank you” and “please” are small words, but they are oh, so powerful.[/font]

[font=Courier New]Harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony is for us the summum bonum – the greatest good. Anything that subverts, that undermines this sought-after good, is to be avoided like the plague. Anger, resentment, lust for revenge, even success through aggressive competitiveness, are corrosive of this good.[/font]

[font=Georgia]It is unity we are talking about, not uniformity. What is needed is to respect one another’s points of view and not to impute unworthy motives on one another or to seek to impugn the integrity of the other. Our maturity will be judged by how well we are able to agree to disagree and yet continue to love one another and to cherish one another and seek the greater good of one another.[/font]

[font=Arial Black]Instead of separation and division, all distinctions make for a rich diversity to be celebrated for the sake of the unity that underlies them. We are different so that we can know our need of one another.[/font]

Here's a beautiful song, called "Samskeyti." I post it here because it's a great meditative piece - and it's impossiuble to be angry when we're meditating...

Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRB7fx0QqgA

Check out this uncanny and inspiring video on You-Tube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsPBVNecOMo