Pride may be over. The prejudice isn’t

Being gay is not a choice

Gay Nigerians celebrate what little there is to celebrate. thetimes.co.uk. See end of article.

“You dance really oddly,” the teenage daughter of a friend told me at a Brussels pub disco night some years ago. “Then don’t look, nosey,” retorted I.

Let me transport you to Montparnasse, Paris, summer 1996. A long-standing friend’s getting married and, the night before the big day, is anguishing: like Genesis, he can’t dance; what would he do for the opening waltz the next evening? In the minuscule lift lobby serving three Montparnasse apartments, I take David away from the hubbub of family and teach him the basics of the English waltz and quickstep (you can’t just waltz). Next day, I make sure his shoelaces are tied and set him to go for gold at the Château de Vincennes. Henry V moved in to Vincennes after beating Charles VI at Agincourt, and those crowned heads couldn’t have been prouder of me. David looked okay, as well.

David needed to know how to dance because people want to see the groom dance his first dance with his new bride. He wanted it to look good; I wanted it to look good for him. And I wanted it to look good for me. Surrogate pride of the trainer (“It was all your own achievement – you couldn’t have done it without me.”) But, though David seemed to be dancing for me, for the guests, for his bride, he in fact danced for himself. Everyone does.

Dance is an art form, it’s a sport, it’s poetry in motion (literally), it’s an outpouring of the soul, along with the sweaty armpits. It’s the expression of what is in the dancer and, though sometimes rehearsed, even the competition performance must feel the vibes, sentiment and elation of the original spirit of the dance: on the actor’s stage, Konstantin Stanislavski called it “emotion memory”. Although millions enjoy the spectacle of dance, the sequins and glitter, grace and elegance, at local club competitions and on TV (including gawping, back then, at Ukraine’s President trip the light fantastic) and although viewers pass judgment, as befits the occasion, one can easily overlook the fact that, in the performing arts, excellence is striven for in order to perfect the expression of that which resides in the artist because the art of artistic expression is the expression of the art in the artist. It may be wonderful to behold, but it’s intended only in second place for the onlooker; it is primarily for the artist him or herself. Just like a javelin throw.

We may judge how others give expression to what lies within them, as dancer, as ice skater, as transgender or as LGBTQI+, for that matter as Jew, Muslim, born-again Christian or atheist, but whether we approve or disapprove, condone or condemn, relish or repugn is ultimately of no relevance. It is the onlooker who makes of it relevance, and then only to him or herself along with his or her admirers, or those they would should be their admirers – if they but knew that. For that does not befit the occasion.

Just as dancing is the outer expression of the joy, perchance the sadness, of the individual, so is the expression of Pride. It’s not done to please a paying guest or contracted beneficiary. It’s a simple statement of who the individual is. It commands respect in no greater or lesser measure than life and integrity command respect. The tolerance that is mustered by the intolerant is not a benevolence on their part, even if they may persuade themselves otherwise. It is begrudged lip-service to tenets and fundaments which the society of which they would otherwise all too gladly purge the tolerated vaunts in the name of civilisation.

There circulates a widely held misconception that people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersexual and related terms constitute a “perversion” on the ground that we consciously choose to identify in that way. That we consciously elect to live a life hiding from parts of society, lying to parents, family, friends and colleagues, skulking to bars and discos, risking physical injury from yobbos and mental injury from clergy, electing to be pointed at at school and in civil life as the odd one out, the strange one, the one who never has a friend of the opposite sex, all as we laugh with others at jokes about us of questionable hue; that schools and colleges are heaving with such individuals, every one of them tainted by our pervasive and unstoppable influence and gagging agog to subscribe to some queer agenda, so blindingly bedazzled, insidiously seduced and deviously enraptured they are with the great Gay Option: where do we sign? 

The path we tread, but did not elect to tread, was laid down by many forerunners, and a key milepost came in June 1969, planted by the brave occupiers of New York’s Stonewall Café. No, we did not choose the path on which this milepost stands, but we hail Stonewall as an epiphany moment, one in which a straw broke a camel’s back and rights were demanded, in which the demand would not be and was not relinquished until met: our forerunners had to fight – a fight that no one would persevere with if they had a simple “cancel choice” option. They fought for what they believed in, and what they believed in was evidenced in flesh and blood by who they were, and it was for who they were that they had no choice but to fight. The changes were hard paid for, with personal sacrifice, in terms of hard cash to coppers (you think police are above a spot of blackmail themselves, do you?), hard terms of incarceration (whose perversion is on a standard with the equally vacuous Victorian imprisonment of debtors) and beatings and killings at the hands of the ignorant; they were never so naïve as to believe that, the day won, our battle would truly be o’er – our battle will never truly be o’er for as long as unfounded prejudice appropriates to it the self-appointed privilege of free rein; but people will have it that, before decriminalisation, we elected to be blackmailed and exploited by tortfeasors; we elected to suffer abuse and be spat at and decried and denigrated and humiliated and discriminated against and ridiculed and typified, overseen and overlooked, and trampled down by elements of our society who wouldn’t acknowledge the concept of choice and self-restraint if they leapt up and grabbed them by the throat and, if by happenstance they did, athirst as they are for the votes of those who do so acknowledge and yet would truly elect them to offices of power in misguided belief in their feigned virtues, would not then shirk from refusing the same choice to the next man or woman, be they whoever. 

This is wrong; it is regression; it is so patently and arrantly absurd: homosexuality is involuntary; the World Health Organisation long ago removed it from its scurrilous list of infectious diseases, albeit the WHO may, in so doing, have lent a contrario force to those who would have it that we consciously adopt our homosexuality, as if it were a fashion on a shop rail. Let me scotch that one: it was removed from the list because it’s not a disease: you can’t catch it, you can’t make another person be homosexual. It’s like being Chinese: you’re either Chinese or you’re not Chinese. You can no more be cured of homosexuality than you can be cured of being born in Timbuktu. It’s not like eating Mongolian barbecue, instead of bratwurst across the street. It’s not a choice like dining out. It’s not a choice, period. Why would anyone think we choose this existence? If choice it were to be, then and only then would it even remotely qualify as perverse: sadomasochistic perversion. It is not and never has been a cakewalk. It’s the persecution we cannot but put up with that nonetheless makes of many LGBTQI+ people special carers and helpers of others: they’ve been in the pain, and can better understand the pain of others.

Being involuntary and born within the psyche of the individual, it squarely falls to be seen as a state of being whose occurrence is a natural phenomenon; and, being natural, it cannot be perverse, since perverse is that within humans which is not born of our natural state – such as sociopathy, which may be in-bred, and therefore pathological, or acquired, and so perverse: even then “perversion” is not a description, it’s a condemnation. He who wishes to condemn will use the term. In short, he who wishes to condemn will condemn, term or no. Some argue that perversion is defined by what is “not normal”, so that my inner self’s validation depends on the incidence of that same condition among the entire human population? Because homosexuals are but a fraction of the general population and therefore not “normal”, they can be validly labelled “perverse”, a term which one supposes extends to other perversions, such as, oh, let me think – choose a minority, any minority. (But, remember, one man’s minority is another man’s population.) Such specious reasoning and coining of arbitrary definitions is, in truth, itself a perversion of language and a ploy and device to lend veiled justification to acts of supposed enforcement and putative retribution against a purported offence declaimed by none but the myopic eye of its beholder. 

In the criminal law, be it common or of Roman origin, no court may condemn the defender charged with an offence unless it be duly satisfied, beyond all reasonable doubt, of the accused’s guilt in terms of the physical acts that they committed and in terms of the state of mind in which they voluntarily elected to commit them (i.e. that they did the act and intended the act). Yet, around the globe, statutes and, unbelievably, constitutions denounce the LGBTQI+ as willing actors, acting with malice aforethought, in choosing of their own will and contrary to law, to “be”, to exist as, a thing that statute proscribes. These laws require no adduction whatsoever of malice, intent or wilfulness; only of being. And, since only evidence of the act can validly constitute evidence of the being, men and women are constrained to refrain from the calumny of holding hands in a public street and deny their own sexuality – a primary life force within them – in a bid to avoid contravening the laws that govern them and, in short, to ensure survival from one day to the next. For, that which the law in such states cannot prove and doesn’t even grace with a travesty of proof, it will, feigning ignorance, happily delegate to the good ministrations of lynch mobs and murderers. In some parts, they lynch Blacks, for being Black, a state no Black can change. James Byrd was one such. And they lynch Queers and argue, with pseudo-intellect, that that’s simply a perverse choice. Matthew Shepard was one such. The intent to kill is cloaked in an intellectual fallacy which claims the homosexual him or herself did act with the unproved but wilful intent that the accusers themselves have not the wit or logical coherence to muster. And they call us perverse. [Continues below images]

This is James Byrd, Junior. Born 1949, died 1989 in Texas, USA. The cause of death was indirectly that he was black. More directly, he was attached to the rear of a truck, and dragged along a road for approximately one and a half miles until one of his arms along with his head became severed from his body. His two assailants drove on unperturbed for a further one and a half miles, before they halted, unhitched what remained of Mr Byrd and deposited him in front of a church. His murder galvanised action that resulted in the Hate Crimes Act of 2009.

[By http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/images/2003/05/07/image552838x.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20863788]

This is Matthew Shepard. Born 1976, died 1998. He was murdered because he was gay. He was offered a lift by two men in a pick-up truck in Colorado, USA, who proceeded to rob him and pistol whip him to the point of breaking open his skull, whereupon his body was mounted on a barbed-wire fence, where he was left for dead. He was found by passers-by who succoured to his aid; but he would not recover. He was 21 years of age. Elton John recorded a song relating the tragedy. It is called “American Triangle.” In it he sings of “three lives wasted, one life spent.” Spent, like a nickel is spent. His story also had a large part to play in enacting the 2009 Hate Crimes Act.

When I was 21, a lad I had been at school with and quite the cheeriest lad I had ever known, his name was Robert Uttley, planned to conquer a peak that had defied mountaineers since time immemorial: Annapurna III, the south-west face. He failed. Caught in a terrible snow storm, he contracted pneumonia and his companion watched helpless as Robert ebbed away into death. It is a story to weep for: Robert, too, was 21 when he departed this world. Nothing, but nothing, would have prevented Robert's endeavour; he was a magnificent mountaineer and he knew his craft. He challenged the mountain and it won. But he did not dishonour himself in the trying. Matthew Shepard did not depart from this world, but was wrenched from it, the victim of man's inhumanity. He challenged nobody. He harmed nobody. And still, his life was plucked away, like some wayside flower. And still, by no accounts did Matthew dishonour himself, either. Neither Robert nor Matthew dishonoured himself.

[By http://sdpix.com/blogs/community-connections/2009/10/08/lgbt-community-moving-forward-upcoming-community-events/ [dead link], Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27462510]

Those who turn tail at Pride events because they’re not their scene, or who scorn folk whose artistic display finds no favour with them should know that there is no obligation to like, nor any to dislike. Not even on Facebook is there any such obligation. “Then don’t look, nosey.” Expression of the inner self is for the self. We do it for us, not them. Because it’s who we are. That much, at least, we know of ourselves.

Those who seek their persecutors have the easiest task of anyone:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/we-must-condemn-persecution-of-gay-people-in-africa-vlm7wf0bg