Tom's Blog

Or more specifically, do you believe in the Christian God?  If yes then why?

Most people would probably answer that with ‘I have faith’ or ‘The bible is God’s Word’.  Except for a very small number of people who converted from another religion (Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, etc) the real answer is that is how you were raised.  If your parents were Christian, you were raised as a Christian and that is what you grow up believing.  There isn’t a universal Truth that draws everyone to a particular god or religion.  When you are a child you believe in anything, Santa Claus, The Tooth Fairy, The Easter Bunny and God.  As you get older you discover all those things you believed in as a child weren’t real but stories, except for God.  You keep being told God is real.  Anyway this was something that popped into my head while cleaning house.

P.S. – It fascinates me that the oldest organized religions are still going strong after several thousand years, like Hinduism.  Back in the early days of Judaism there was a concerted effort to destroy the god Ba’al by the Yahweh which eventually succeeded since you’d be hard pressed to find anyone today who worships Ba’al.  God doesn’t seem to be as interested today in removing the competition though.  There are some fringe elements in most religious organizations that talk about cleansing the Earth of the false gods, ie any but their own, but most mainstream clergy tend to take a live and let live view of other religions.

An old friend called the other night.  We haven’t talked on the phone for quite awhile, in at least a year and haven’t actually seen each other face to face in several years as he lives out of state now.  He said he was surprised to discover I’m a radical gay, to which I replied that I didn’t think I was really a radical.

Though admittedly by the stands of day when I first met him my views today are pretty radical.  Back in the early 80′s I was deep in the closet and the doors were locked tight.  Gay sex was still illegal in a lot of states back then.  Can you believe it wasn’t until 2003 that sodomy laws in all 50 states were finally ruled unconstitutional?  That must have really annoyed Bush since it was his Supreme Court that made the ruling.  Things like gay marriage weren’t even a fantasy.

I think what he saw as radical I see as vocal.  Now I only started coming out about two and a half years ago and for me the experience has in general been a good one.  When I say I’m ‘vocal’ it’s really on the Internet.  My family, friends and co-workers know I’m gay but I don’t advertise that I am gay when out shopping for groceries etc.  On the other hand I don’t hide it either.  When I took a writing class at the Loft this Fall, I came out to the class since gay themes came up and I had just attended the Gaylaxicon convention.

Gays get told a lot that we shouldn’t flaunt our lifestyle.  What they are really saying is if you want to be gay fine, but keep it in the closet.  I’m afraid that doesn’t work for me.  I’m out of the closet and I am delighted and proud to have Jeffrey as my partner and I feel better about myself now than I probably ever have.  I admit you will never see us making out at a Chipotle restaurant like the straight couple I saw last weekend (and they weren’t teenagers either), but you might see us holding hands.  Straight people need to see more out gay people around them and realize how often they interact with us on a daily basis already.

That said, I torn between wanting people to accept us as we are and being as out as I can be and wanting to keep my sex life private since it’s really no ones business that I’m in love with and having sex with another man.  Sometimes life is so complicated, but radical or not it is fun.

Well I start back to full-time next week.  Yay!  So this is my last long weekend for awhile and I’ll probably spend most of it doing some cleaning around the house.  Nothing to major, just vacuuming, dusting, mopping and I’ll change the bedding in the snake’s habitat this weekend.  If everything goes according to plan next week, Jeffrey will be here by the end of the week and after he’s recovered from driving out from LA he can start helping.

It’s going to be tough getting up Monday and going to work and then spending an entire 8 hours there.    I’ve been spoiled this summer.  I am not complaining though and I really do like my work.

Started reading a book called “Outing Yourself” by Michelangelo Signorile.  Was curious if I was coming out the closet the right way.  Jeffrey laughed when I told him that and said I was hilarious.  The book sets out 14 steps for coming out.  Interestingly I followed the first few steps I’ve read about pretty closely without knowing what I was doing.

Of course step 1 is coming out to yourself and part of that is getting rid of your self-hatred.  It’s pretty much impossible to grow up gay without developing some self-hate.  Everywhere it’s indoctrinated into everyone that being gay is a bad thing and it’s only recently that there have been positive messages to counter that.  Anyway as I was reading that I really thought about self-hate more generally.  Gays aren’t the only ones that are taught to hate themselves.

Through advertising people are taught to hate themselves because of body image, to fat, to thin, to black, to white.  Hair in the wrong places, teeth not white enough and so on.  Really it’s a wonder that anyone can grow up and like themselves.  Even socially we teach hate, your religion is the wrong one, your ethnicity is the wrong one, your political party is the wrong one.  Just watch the news and you’ll see that just about every piece of bad news reported is about hate at some level.  Hate is a destructive force and self-hate is even more destructive.  I don’t believe you can really love someone else unless you can love yourself first.

The first steps in the book deal with coming out to yourself and beginning the process of ridding yourself of self-hate so you can move on.  After thinking about that, I suspect we should all look in a mirror and try to root out some of the self-hate so we can be more loving to those around us.

I’m not talking about a backlash against GLBTQ community here, but a backlash of the GLBTQ community against a society that is refusing to grant them their rights.  A lot of people’s hopes were lifted to unprecedented highs during the last presidential campaign as Obama spoke of being a furious advocate for Gay Rights and of course everyone cheered when he mentioned the GLBT community in his inaugural address.  So here we are about 10 months into his Presidency and how do things stand?

This Wednesday Obama will sign the Matthew Shepard & James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act.  This is a good thing although Obama didn’t have anything to do with getting it passed.  It had enough support to pass in past legislatures, but Bush swore to veto it and there wasn’t enough support to overturn a veto.

There has been no other progress on the Federal level of GLBTQ rights.  At the state level next week we’ll see if Maine voters allow the Gay Marriage law go into effect there.  Washington D.C. is likely to pass some sort of Gay Marriage law in near future.  Washington state will also be voting on whether to allow an expanded civil unions law go into effect.

Washington state is interesting in that the opposition has so far managed to keep the names of people and companies who signed the petition to overturn the expanded civil unions law that would have allowed everything but marriage for domestic partnerships (gay or straight) secret.  After the backlash against supporters of Prop 8 in California they claimed that publishing the names would expose them to a similar backlash.  No doubt it would and should.  If I was a gay in Washington state I would like to know what businesses supported Referendum 71 and be able to take my money to a business that was at least neutral if not actively supportive of my rights.  A friend of mine’s company that does web development etc for businesses in Europe and Asia has been working on a service called ‘Pink Pound’ that when it goes online would provide a forum for the GLBTQ community in England to find businesses that are gay friendly.  He offered to let me have the source if I wanted to change it to create a similar service called ‘Pink Dollar’ for here in the USA.  Unfortunately I can’t afford to run that sort of a website free of charge, but I would love to see something like that happen.

I read a lot of gay news sites and blogs and I have noticed a growing anger and in some cases outright hostility toward Obama and the Legislature.  It’s easy to see why.  Politicians flip-flop and spin saying there isn’t support back home for repealing DOMA or DADT.  The time isn’t right and to be patient, maybe during Obama’s second term.  I think 2010 is going to be an interesting election year.  A lot of Independents who are vocally supportive of GLBTQ rights may find themselves with donations and volunteers that the Democrats would have normally expected to come to them.  And unless something changes in 2012 when Obama is up for re-election support from the GLBTQ community is going to be lukewarm at best.

This is going to be my last four day weekend for awhile.  Starting Nov 1st I’ll be back on full-time at work.  Maybe the recession really is starting to pass.  It has been nice though having long weekends all summer.  Fortunately the house and car are paid off so only working half-time since April has been an inconvenience financially rather than a disaster.  It’s going to be an adjustment going back to working 8 hours a day 5 days a week though.  Fortunately I like where I work and the projects are interesting which is a lot more than most people can say.

Anyway a lot to get done this weekend.  Need new front tires on the car, oil change etc.  Lots of housework to do too.  I want to empty out a closet for Jeffrey so he’ll have someplace to hang his clothes when he gets here.  Plus I need to swap out summer clothes for my winter clothes.  There isn’t much to do outside with all the rain we’ve been getting.  Probably a good thing I don’t have many books screaming at me to read them though.  I just finished ‘Turnskin’ and ‘The Last Herald-Mage” both of which were good.

Well Monday night was my last ‘Beginning Fiction’ class.  I think it accomplished what I wanted, which was to give me a jump start writing again.  The last time I seriously tried writing was back in early 80′s and I honestly don’t know how anyone could write something longer than a few pages using pen and paper or a typewriter.  When I write something I just type away getting as much down as I can and then go back, rewrite it and then go back and edit it some more.  Computers and software like Word make that so much easier.  It’s no wonder there is an explosion of writers out there.  Pity hardly anyone reads anymore.  Anyway I’m trying to set some time aside each day and write.  I have no illusions about ever becoming a full-time author hopefully though someday I’d like to win a Spectrum award for something I write.   In the meantime I might sign up for another class in January.

Barnes & Noble announced their eBook hardware recently, the Nook.  They are hoping it will be what everyone will want rather than a Kindle from Amazon.  I’m still not sold on the idea of eBooks.  Not because I’m particularly in love with holding a paper book, which I do enjoy, but rather it’s more a matter of the loss of control of the book.  When it’s in digital form, Amazon or B&N can decide to take the book back by remotely deleting it from the device.  Also the way I sometimes read a book doesn’t always follow from beginning to end.  For example I’ve read stories where the author jumps from one set of characters to another alternating between chapters and everyone gets together toward the climax.  Tolkien’s ‘Return of the King’ was like that, alternating between Frodo, Sam and Gollem getting to Mount Doom and the war going on in Middle Earth.  So I’ll find myself reading every other chapter to follow the thread I’m interested in.  Something else I’ll do that will probably set a lot of people’s teeth on edge is read the first few chapters of a book and if I really really like what I’m reading, I’ll jump ahead and read the last two or three chapters, then go back and read the middle.  I also do that if a book isn’t grabbing my interest, except usually I don’t bother going back to read the middle.  That’s what happened with the Twilight series.  Jeffrey bought me the first three books because everyone was raving about them and he knew I like vampire stories.  Unfortunately they were written for a pretty specific audience and I’m not in it.

Sigh, just wrote the check for the second half of my 2009 property taxes.  Over $950.  The first year’s property taxes in 2000 were a bit over $600 for whole year and nine years later just a bit under $2000 for the year.  Thank you Governor Tim Pawlenty for mucking up the state budget so badly in your terms as governor and you are seriously thinking about running for President?  No wonder people on fixed incomes have to give up their homes.