A homeland for homos? Ludicrous!

Founded in suffering and in God’s commandment

Is there a gay homeland? You know, the land promised to gays as being their own, pre-destined by God? Where would that be?

Amsterdam, perhaps. The port city that welcomed the downtrodden and rejected over many centuries, that is liberal to a fault, opening its gates to the Huguenots, the Jews, victims of injustice …? “In recent decades, historians have seen the Dutch Enlightenment of the seventeenth century as the root of the wider Enlightenment. And at the center of this sits the city of Amsterdam. The city today is infamous for its permissiveness. But the sex-and-drugs sense of liberalism relates back to the wider, grander sense of the word. There is a connection between the city that spawned Spinoza and the city where John and Yoko came to hold their Bed-In for Peace (Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City).

What about Palm Springs, California? A city that lives by the three 60 rules. Sixty per cent of the city’s population are gay, and 60% of those are aged over 60. The retirement resort for gay executives from Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego. A bone-dry desert climate for all that coastal rheumatism.

Or West Hollywood (California), Provincetown (Rhode Island), or Sitges (Barcelona). Some, perhaps, might prefer to send all the gays off to Iran. Or Rockall... But surely there is a homeland for gays somewhere on the big, wide globe of ours? Surely we have come to deserve it, after all the persecution that we have suffered over all the years, centuries, millennia, during which our unnatural state has been deemed deserving of an unnatural death, decree’d by courts, of law as of public opinion, as a form of natural justice?

Let the calumny heaped upon us since the days of Leviticus found our right and just claim to a homeland of our own! If Israel would only indulge us! Allow our return to our rightful place of origin: beloved Sodom and Gomorrah! How grateful we should be to be accorded this promised land of iniquity! That we might indulge the remainder of the world, free heterosexuality from our sin and our depravity, and thereby cleanse all other places to a state of virginal purity! This we beseech of you, by dint of our long, arduous suffering!

Has our suffering not been enough? England’s Edward II, murdered with a red-hot poker up his behouchie, to punish him his proclivity for other men? And many others, neither kings nor, in truth, queens: Gordon Church, Matthew Shepard, Eva Analía De Jesús, Tehuel de la Torre, Edwin Chiloba, Raymond Keam, Tyrone Unsworth, Edivaldo Silva de Oliveira and Jeovan Bandeira, Alexandre Thome Ivo Rajao, Aaron Webster, the victims of the Little Pond firebomb, the Admiral Duncan bombing, the 2009 Tel Aviv gay centre shooting, the Pulse shooting, the Club Q shooting, Susana Sanhueza, Wilfred de Bruijn, Bertrand Delanoë, Charlie Self, Mark O’Neill, Brendan Courtney, Brian Williamson, Damilola Taylor, and Ronnie Antonio Paris—three years old and murdered by a father who feared his son would be a sissy.

There are thousands more. And, back to biblical times, maybe millions: perhaps even six million. Murdered, eliminated, disposed of, not for something that they did, but for something that they were, or were suspected to be: homosexual. Picked out, identified, triaged for their usefulness, and then slaughtered; aye, even by Nazis. With guns, machetes, bombs, fists and bludgeons. And gas.

Of course, I realise that pleading for a homeland for homosexuals would be asking for trouble. First, who would populate it in years to come? We could always rape some Sabine women, I suppose. Hm.

There might be those in that homeland prepared to adopt the orphans of the rest of the world’s warfare, and I’m sure the rest of the world would all too readily find another enemy to persecute once we’d all settled in our Homoland.

A place where the passport declares the holder to be a citizen of the land, but not a citizen of a sexual proclivity. How silly that would be. Those who were adopted to grow up there and so desired, could live on in peace with their forefathers; those who wished to leave could freely do so. No one in the land of homosexuals would be labelled as a homosexual. Little by little, the gays and the lesbians would learn to accommodate the heterosexuals and give them freedoms and liberties in the land of homosexuality, so that all could live in peace and harmony together.

Or, do you see things developing otherwise? Militant gays and lesbians guarding the border of Homoland with guns and artillery, and excluding all who profess their heterosexuality? What of the heterosexuals who already live in our Homoland of Sodom and Gomorrah? Would they be allowed to integrate with us, to share a common life and a common livelihood, without regard for what anyone did when they were in the privacy of their own bedrooms? No, there would be no camera surveillance!

That could work, yes: but only as long as equal rights were accorded to both the new citizens of Homoland and their fellow heterosexual citizens. But, no, the heterosexuals, they could not take over our homeland, no way! They would be tolerated, but they could not hold office or aspire to ruling us! We will mark their automobiles as driven by a heterosexual and, if they try to advance claims against us, we will … gently but firmly … put them in their heterosexual place. For millennia of suffering has entitled the gays and lesbians and transsexuals and all other LGBTQI+ deviants to the right and the honour of a homeland of their own!

It’s already starting to sound ludicrous, isn’t it? To select a homeland for a group of people who suffered over millennia for something that they are, rather than what they’ve done? To carve out a state for them from land that is of another? Is there a precedent for such an outlandish proposal?

And then to treat the other as a foreigner in their own land, on their own land? Does that make sense? Surely better, not to treat the other as a foreigner, but to welcome them into a common fold, on the basis of what they are, as opposed to what they have done (which would be: nothing)?

There will, I’m fairly sure, never, ever be a gay homeland; because the world would rise up in raucous laughter at the mere idea that simply possessing a characteristic—and a flawed one at that—should warrant the entitlement to a reserved portion of the globe’s surface just for them.

A nation state founded in homosexuality sounds like a nation state founded in ethnicity, as opposed to mere geographical ownership of land; and, more sinisterly, it already professes its desire for ethnic purity. Any nation state that proclaims ethnic purity as its founding precept is guilty from the outset of a desire for ethnic cleansing, and that is a dangerous precept on which to proceed, for it comes perilously close to advocating the elimination, whether by death or by expulsion, of those who do not fulfil the ethnic criterion by which that country stands. And that is abhorrent.

Israel, a nation that defines its citizens not by virtue of its demonym, but by virtue of their religion, is accused of genocide and, in response to that accusation, has been ordered by a court of law to take measures to ensure that that does not occur. Israel invokes biblical promises—a promised land—and choices—a chosen people—as founding its right to exist where it exists, and as founding its right to expand where it exists into where it now wishes to exist. It denies its contravention of a convention; it denies its flouting of a charter; it claims its rights by biblical decree; it cites a religious text as its ultimate founding document.

Now, it must comply with the writ of the court, and, in truth, it must comply with the document it cites as its foundation: thou shalt not kill. If it’s good enough to found a nation, it’s good enough to found the principles upon which that nation lives. For, if political expediency is to be hived off from God’s commandment, so be it; but do not then found on God’s commandment for political expediency.