blurb : Gay & Black Glossary

“Drop this mean and sordid and selfish devotion to the saving of your shabby little souls, and hunt up something to do that’s got some dignity to it! Risk your souls! Risk them in good causes; then if you lose them, why should you care? Reform!”
~ Mark Twain, Was it Heaven? or Hell?

Preface

You might notice a certain unevenness of style. That is because there were contributors who preferred to remain anonymous. Perhaps now they may be more willing to step forward and take a bow for the more memorable lines such as "blackmail each other for amusement", "smooth style, not crunchy please" and "put an a sou’ wester and gumboots and chase him around the room beating him with a wet salmon".

front cover

back cover

Introduction

I have tried to answer every question that could conceivably arise, but because of such a broad scope I have had to sacrifice depth — especially the evidence to back up my claims. The blurb is not the last word on Canadian homosexuality -- for nearly every sentence I could find someone who would dispute it. I do not claim to speak for all gays. This booklet is a collection Of my own personal beliefs and prejudices, based almost entirely on my own experience. However, in parts (such as the lesbian section) I have had to rely on information from my friends and acquaintances. When you read this booklet, please let me know your ideas so that they may be incorporated in the next revision. Gradually the blurb will come to reflect a closer picture of the many sides of gay life.

Facing Your Homosexuality

Don’t feel guilty, because you are not alone! I can tell you again And again that you are not unique, but here are a few statistics taken from A 1948 study done by Drs. Kinsey, Martin, and Pomeroy using a study design of extreme sophistication involving 5000 American men and 6000 American women. They were not raving queers trying to convert people to the cause so they had no reason to distort the statistics. They felt the following statistics were conservative as not all the people who were homosexual would admit the fact.

13% of American women have reached orgasm from at least one homosexual experience. 28% of American women have been conscious of a specifically erotic response to another female.

4% of American males are exclusively homosexual for their entire lives. 10% of American males are exclusively homosexual for 3 or more consecutive years during post-adolescence (18 to 65). 18% of American males have at least as much homosexual experience as heterosexual experience for 3 or more years During post-adolescence. 30% of American males have reached an orgasm by having fellatio performed on them by another male. 50% of American males have some homosexual experience leading to orgasm after adolescence. 60% of American males are sexually attracted to another male at least once during post-adolescence.

Now for Christ’s sake, this means that if you have never pelt any sexual feeling for another guy you are in the minority! It also means that if you walk Into a room of 40 guys, the chance that there is no other homosexual guy there besides yourself is only o.38% — you could bet at 260 to 1 odds that there is at least one other homosexual there and make money in the long run. So you are not alone. But even if we are in the minority, as are people with blond hair, and so (in the strict sense) blond hair is deviant and abnormal but no one worries "Why am I blond? What are the causes of blondness?" No one busies himself inventing cures for blondness that convert blonds into normal people with mousy brown hair. No one persecutes blonds for being different. So being deviant — in the minority — is not in itself evil.

This may seem a bit of a paradox, but if you come out your chances of becoming straight are much improved. The reason is this. Chances are that you are quite shy around girls or else they always treat you as a big brother. No girl ever thinks of you in sexual terms. You are a bit old to be a virgin, and girls expect you to know what you are doing. Because of your lack of experience and lack of confidence and fear of rejection, you never try anything. Once you do come out, you are finally able to express your physical desires (with another guy). All that bottled-up passion finally escapes. You get rid of your constipate) introspective thinking. You learn to give a little. You learn a lot about other people’s feelings. And up course you pick up a lot of sexual experience.

Most of this experience is directly translatable to your relationships with girls. Girls love gay guys. They are forever trying to ‘convert’ you, but You are somewhat immune to their charms. This makes you all the more interesting and thus you can charm girls very easily. When one finally does seduce you, you will discover how unbelievably similar it is to making love to a guy. I still can’t get over how similar it is. I really wonder how society can make such a big thing of which sex you sleep with if, with your eyes closed), you can hardly tell the difference.

Don’t feel guilty, as you might not even be gay. We all tend to sexualise our desires. People have a need for love, physical sex, physical contact and social contact. These are quite separate desires. A lot of guys just need physical contact. In other societies, males can touch each other We in North America have the silly idea that all contact is sexual. I know a Lot of guys who come down to the club who never pick anyone or for sex. They Are satisfied by coming down there and soaking up the warmth of other male bodies. As you will see later, gays touch. You may just be longing for physical contact with other males, or you may just be longing for social contact. Lionel Tiger’s theory is that males have m non-sexual bond — a genetic remnant of the days when males had to go off together and co-operate fully on hunting parties. Again we mistake this bond, this enjoyment of male company, as A homosexual bond.

Don’t feel guilty, as it is not an innate evil in you that made you homosexual, but rather what happened to shape your sex attitudes when you were young. The hormone imbalance and inborn theories of yesteryear are all but overthrown. There are two main ways people become homosexual.

1. If you became homosexual by the first way, you had a domineering mother whom you may hate, love, or be indifferent to) and a withdrawn father (whom you may hate, love or be indifferent to) when you were a child, your mother treated you like a girl with an over-emphasis on neatness, niceness or spirituality. You were a little prude (from your puritanical upbringing) are hence did not get on well with guys your own age. When you reached adolescence you had Trouble sexually with girls because of your prudishness and because up your anxiety about rejection or failure in heterosexual relations though you might have got on quite well with them on a platonic level.

   While all the other boys your own age were out having one whale of a time homosexually, you were too afraid to join in. You probably fell in love With some boy you admired because me was athletic and popular — the two traits you lacked you developed divergent interests from the buys your own age and thus became socially isolated. But you were a bright little kid and you knew your interest was homosexual and hence ’evil’. You did a mighty job of repressing these desires, though you brooded on them constantly.

   Paradoxically then, your indulging friends grew out of the homosexual phase, but moralistic, abstemious you were left stuck with it. As you reached 18 your permanent sex patterns began to set. At about 22 you have now decided that you don’t care if it is evil; you have thought about it until you are numb; And you now just want some sex.

2. If you became homosexual by the second way, you probably had a quite normal childhood when you were in the normal homosexual phase (ages 13 to 15) You fell in with some older gay guys. They convinced you that your normal 13 year-old homosexual longings were gay. As you grew older they teased you about your developing heterosexual interests. At about age 18, these homosexual patterns became fixed.

   But everyone is unique and any of these factors mentioned may be missing or there may be others I have omitted but please notice that the cause of homosexuality is nut a depraved mind. The problem is not what made you homosexual, but what gummed up the process of becoming heterosexual.

A new theory is that homosexuality is learned. Nearly all young boys have sexual experiences with both sexes. Just by chance it turns out that his first experiences with boys are emotionally satisfying (and homosexuality is reinforced by ‘reward’) whereas his first sexual experiences with girls are smash flops (and his heterosexuality is inhibited by ‘punishment’). Like a Pavlovian dog he subconsciously learns to be homosexual

Another theory is that gays are not deviant — our Judeo-Christian Society is! There are much weaker taboos against homosexuality In Japan the Philippines, Korea, Malaysia, Morocco and Bolivia. In these and Most other non-Judeo-Christian countries bisexuality is considered the norm, a wide variety of sexual response is a feature of every human culture which has been scientifically studied. Sexuality is much more than just reproduction! This is not to say that all these forms of behaviour are considered socially ‘acceptable’. Our own western culture has what is probably the narrowest definition of ‘acceptable’ behaviour that has ever been known — even heterosexual intercourse between unmarried adults is prohibited.

When we live in a society where we are not allowed free sexual response, we have to assume sexual roles — stereotyped sets of actions that are acceptable. Men who go overboard on this rule playing have what is termed the ‘John Wayne syndrome’. These men play the role of man as tough, unemotional and heterosexual to ludicrous extremes.

At one time gay society was as stereotype-ridden as the straight one and gays had to play the fairy role to be accepted by the rest of gay society, but this has changed.

An important point to bring out is that homosexuality is a huge umbrella covering a wide variety of sexual behaviour — from male prostitution to de-facto marriages. I doubt that a single theory will ever account for this spectrum of behaviour. It is like expecting a simple answer to the question of why a man loves some women but not others.

Don’t feel guilty, because homosexuality is not wicked. I dare you to meet 100 homosexual people and then say that homosexuals are evil. In fact, they are a terrible bunch up do-gooders. Each one has a nagging guilt, so he compensates by doing a lot of community service work or by working for civil rights, ecology, or ban-the-bomb organizations. He has a greater social conscience than his straight brother.

You will hear silly stories like homosexuality was the downfall of Rome. Did It ever occur to you that homosexuality was much more wide-spread and accepted among the barbarians that destroyed the rotten empire, than by the Romans?

Did it ever occur to you that if homosexuality were truly a bad trait, i.e. one which is detrimental to the race as a whole, then this possibility would have bred itself out of the human stock or else our species would have perished long ago?

When you study zoology, you will find out how magnificently adapted animals are to their environments (from millennia of natural selection or from God’s wisdom if you prefer). If you dig deep enough, you will find that every cell in an animal’s body has its own particular role to play in keeping that animal alive. Every behavioural reflex somehow helps that animal, or its species, to survive. Homosexuality is a fact in the human animal. It would be absurd to think that homosexuality alone (of all the reactions of the human animal that are so perfectly adapted to their environment) should not have some function in keeping the human species alive. Perhaps it is a population control mechanism (homosexual behaviour among rats increases dramatically as the population density increases; overt homosexuality in humans is much more prevalent in large cities than in small towns). Perhaps it subdues the rivalry between males so that they can work together. We must have an important function in keeping society going or else there wouldn’t be so many of us.

You must stop defining yourself solely in terms of what sex you prefer. If someone asks, "What are you?" You immediately think "homosexual" rather than "painter" or "computer programmer". There are many more things about you that are more important than what type up genitals you prefer.

Homosexuality As A Disease

One of the practical results of behavioural psychology is a ‘cure’ for homosexuality. You are strapped in a chair and pictures are flashed on a screen in front of you. Every once in a while, a picture of a nude man will appear on the screen and at the same time you receive an electric shock. The shock continues until you press a button that brings on the next picture — of a nude woman. Pictures of nude men become associated with the painful electric shock and pictures of nude women become associated with relief from pain.

After the treatment is over, you will feel nauseous at the sight of a picture of a nude man and will salivate appropriately at a picture of a nude woman. However, your feelings toward real-life men and women remain unchanged. Using modifications of this technique, psychologists are claiming successful ‘cures’, but they hasten to add that the method could equally well be used to ‘cure’ a heterosexual by changing him into a homosexual.

Even Ann Landers and Dear Abby advise their homosexual readers, ‘Forget about being cured as even the best cure rates are only 4%. You must learn to live with your homosexuality, see a psychiatrist — not to be cured, but to get help accepting yourself as you are.’

A friend of mine, Keith R., was once asked on a radio talk show, do you know of any homosexuals who were cured?". He replied, "Yes. Three of them — they all committed suicide."

It is impossible to ‘cure’ homosexuals because they are not ‘sick’ in the first place.

Religious Objections

My advice would be to read Towards a Quaker View of Sex edited by Alastair Heron. It is applicable to most Christian sects — not just the Quakers. Many of the ideas in this section were pirated from this book.

Even though no other religions except the Christian and Jewish ones concerned themselves with homosexuality, the Christian church has always frowned on homosexual practices, and the ancient Jews distrusted them, apparently because they cannot lead to the procreation of children. (How strange it is that in modern times we tolerate married heterosexual couples who use birth control, and yet we jeer at married homosexual couples who practice the ultimate in birth control — the only method with no known failures — homosexuality.)

St. Paul seems to have regarded homosexual behaviour itself with abhorrence, apparently because such acts were ‘unnatural’.Romans 1:27"and likewise also with men, leaving the natural use of women, burned in their lust toward one another," suggests that St. Paul subscribed to the prairie fire view of homosexual conduct -- that it is naturally more attractive than heterosexual satisfaction, and that if allowed legally and morally everyone would turn to it. This is plainly contrary to experience — most societies (i.e. the non-Judeo-Christian ones) have no such taboos against homosexuality, and I refuse to believe that women in those cultures are sexually neglected. It is no more likely that people will turn to bestiality if it is legalized and morally sanctioned than they will to homosexuality. As for it being unnatural, homosexual behaviour exists in every human culture and in most of the species of the higher mammals. Unnatural is what we call things we are afraid and do not yet understand.

Other than two verses in Leviticus, (Leviticus is the book where people who commit adultery, marry their wife’s sister, have intercourse with women during their periods, eat the fat of any animal etc. are either to be banished or put to death) the only other anti-homosexual references are in the writings of St. Paul, who left no doubt about his ideas in I Corinthians 6:9 "know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind… Shall inherit the kingdom of God." His opinions may have been personal ones, however, or part of the accepted Jewish thought of the day. Equally strong prohibitions that women should not pray with their hats off (I Corinthians 11:5), nor speak in church in I Corinthians 14:34) tend to be disregarded by most modern Christians, so that St. Paul’s views are not, in themselves, final.

There are hundreds of condemnations of heterosexual sex between unmarried couples in the Bible and only a handful condemning homosexual sex. Hmmm.

One important point to make is that Jesus himself never once made mention of the evils of homosexuality. Perhaps he felt it was such a minor sin that it was not worth fretting about. Perhaps when he said, "Love thy neighbour" he meant just that and love between men is good.

The Un-Come-Out Gay

… to be continued.