The F-word is off on a school trip and I miss him pretty bad, but I’m also enjoying a bit of girly time with girl friends, and having some girly time to myself, listening to girly music like the Grinderman album and writing girly poetry about how I’d like to turn into an elephant so that it would take 500 bullets to bring me down. The conviction is there, but it’s not writing itself. Not angry enough these days.
Last night, I got high and watched a documentary about making gays stop being gay. You can find it on this page, under the title Gay Conversion. What a money spinner that looks to be. It’s times like this that I know I have principles, because if I didn’t that’s a bandwagon I’d jump onto faster than a young, naked, beckoning Charles Bronson. Invent a therapist qualification, move to the States and get my business card into the hands of broken-hearted parents. I could have lovely foamy money baths while having a money fight with my expensive ponies as they galloped past through my money fields, but I won’t.
Couple of reasons. One: I still remember the day I first had a chance to get a gay man to stop being gay - a gay man I’d been finding very hot to boot. And while this was back in my most undiscriminating days, I put his drunk ass in a cab for Boystown without a second thought. Even then, when I'd make bets with myself in the morning over what bed I'd end up in that night, I couldn’t stand the sudden conviction in the air that one hole was as good as another, which is all I think gay conversion programmes, no matter how expensive, can convince somebody of.
Which leads to the second reason: the God angle driving the thing is false advertising. I’m sure the loving, all-powerful God who I invoke whenever some Belgian twat opens a car door in my bicycle’s path doesn’t care about holes as long as we’re kind to the people they belong to. But when one pretends He does, money becomes no object – do you want to keep your money, or do you want an eternity of hellfire for you and your child? And if you start on children young enough, you don’t even have to restrict the financial bonanza to gays and their families – you could extend it to the families of millions of poor little kids who play doctor with their friends or stare quizzically at each other in the shower, trying to work out what’s normal.
I’m in awe at the way the corollaries of American Christianity bleed the flock dry. Tithing I get – it’s like taxation, if your ministry has an admirable social agenda. But convincing the flock that gayness is wrong enough to spend $2000 a week ‘curing’. . . can’t you imagine God calling these people to account and asking, if they had the power to extract that much money from their flock, why they didn’t use it to relieve the suffering of the truly desperate instead of to try to convince their clients that one hole was as good as another? What fun.
No, gentle readers, I fear God too much to become an ungayist, and you have spoken, or at least 11 of you have, and 72% of that 11 suggested that I become a muckraking journalist. So instead I will ferret out the iniquitous and unexpected in our nasty, naughty world, and throw it at your feet. But I’m not going to Russia; that place is fucked up. And I also reserve the right to be 13% novelistic and 8% ornamental. So here’re the results of my first investigation – what an early-70’s Japanese commercial for a product called Mandom, advertised by Charles Bronson, looks like.
Answer: I want to say NSFW, but I think I’m the only person who’d see it as pornographic instead of just fucking hilarious:
5 commenti:
I grew up in a church and one of my fellow churchmates had a gay father. Of course, we didn't know he was gay. He was married to a bitchy woman who would fly into a fit and refuse to let her family do this or that on what seemed to the community like a whim. Of these whims, taking her kids out of school to shelter them from the world (when she was the one warning her 6 year olds about being raped in back alleys) and even the church. He had 4 lovely girls who were and still are great though a bit damaged by their mother. But who could blame her for being so bitchy and paranoid? She married a gay man who married her because he believed that god would not allow him to be himself. So he got married. His life was ruined, her life was ruined and 4 girls had a very hard upbringing. They got divorced when we were heading off to university and now he is openly gay, happy and everyone is recovering. I don't know what happened to the mother. She wasn't my favourite person because she wouldn't let my best friend come to my house to play - she was paranoid.
My point is that denying who you are not only can ruin your life but it impacts others as well who build their lives around the illusion you build up around you. When the illusion comes crumbling down, there are so many people scrambling for pieces. Of course, it isn't his fault he denied his gay self. It was his religion's fault.
to be fair, "Ungayist" was not an option on the poll...
I like the horsey sounds on the Bronson infomercial - I take it that application of Mandom gains one entry into some Magic Land of Man?
I can't help but feel it was both their faults. Religion wouldn't let him be gay, but there wasn't no God holding a gun to his head telling him to not be gay with a wife and four kids, as I'm sure she told him on the day he decided to stop denying his gay self.
Maybe that's what the Japanese verbiage at the end was about, Baywatch. "Mmmmm . . . Mandom. Apply with incredible liberality and immediately enter the magical horsey bullety Land of Random Manliness." I know I'm sold.
I was one of the two who said you should be a novelist 13% of the time. I bet you'd have Oprah knocking down your door, trying to get you on her show. And then you could use her show as a platform to talk about 'ungaying'...
You're an evil genius, Melbine!
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