HOMOPHOBIC TRAUMA William Edelen January 28, 2007 I have always believed in the evolution of consciousness. Especially from those who blabber every Sunday morning from pulpits about something called "love". Ugly and vicious internal battles are going on today in Episcopalian churches, as well as Methodist, Presbyterian and others. And of course all fundamentalist churches are in homophobic trauma. I am having doubts about the evolution of consciousness.
A roll call of the brilliant gays and lesbians of history who have made giant contributions to our evolution as a species and to our cultural heritage, would include the following. King James (yes, of King James bible fame)....Plato..Alexander the Great...Leonardo Da Vinci...Gore Vidal...Michelangelo...Walt Whitman...Emily Dickinson...Gertrude Stein...Rock Hudson...Greta Garbo..W.H. Auden...Amy Lowell...Tennessee Williams...Thornton Wilder...Willa Cather...Jane Austen...Henry James...George Santayana...Babe Zaharias...Christopher Isherwood...Peter Tchaikovsky...Oscar Wilde...Clifton Webb...Ethel Waters...Frederick the Great...Liberace...Rudolph Valentino...James Dean...James Hormel...Ramon Navarro...Malcolm Forbes...Christopher Marlowe...Phillip Johnson...Van Cliburn...Edward Everett Horton...John Gielgud....George Gershwin...Adrian...Aristotle...Hadrian...Chastity Bono...Noel Coward...Agnes Moorehead...Montgomery Clift...Anthony Perkins...Virginia Woolf...Edward Albee...Andre Gide...Sumner Welles...Cole Porter...George Cukor...Marcel Proust...Rudolph Nureyev...Genet...Dag Hammarskjold...Martina Navratilova...John Chever...Aaron Copland...A.E. Housman...William Tilden...Greg Louganis...Ian McKellen...Richard Halliburton...Lawrence of Arabia...William Haines...Horatio Alger...Jean Genet...Ethel Waters....Leonard Bernstein...and space limitations preclude my listing thousands more of many of the most creative and brilliant representatives of our species. I have two nephews. brothers, who often visited me on Marine Corps and Naval Air Stations. They always wanted to be a fighter pilot like their "uncle Bill". They both became that. Both of them top Naval Fighter pilots. One became the Number one Top Gun of that elite group. His brother is gay and has been as far back as he can remember. Today he is a captain with one of Americas largest airlines and is one of the finest pilots in America. Gay. Robert Bernstein, former Senior Trial Lawyer for the U.S. Dept. of Justice, wrote an excellent book "Straight Parents, Gay Children." He and his wife were told by their daughter that she had always been a lesbian. They embraced her with love, and marched with her in gay parades. Bob went on to become the National President of PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.) one of the finest and most loving organizations in America. He had a full house when he spoke to my Sunday Symposium in Palm Springs. When is the good Christian love going to extend to the over 600,000 lesbian and gay youth under 18 years of age in California alone. The suicide rate is the highest in gay and lesbian children because of their families inability to accept who they are and give them the Christian 'love' they prattle about every Sunday in church. The Christian church has a 2000 year old history of opposing scientific truth and blocking moral issues: the brutal persecution of Copernicus...Galileo...Bruno...Vesalius and others; supporting slavery with biblical references...fighting against the rights of women, including voting...still an issue today where wives are told to stay in their place as biblically defined. How many future generations of morally sensitive people are going to be amazed, and laughing, at the homophobic ignorance and superstitions of todays churches? In the name of Christian love, the thin-lipped witch hunting moralists are at work. Poor things. They can hardly get out of bed in the morning without knees shaking,..hands shaking and lips quivering. The sexual world they have to face each day is full of fantasized goblins...devils..evil spirits and bogeymen and their church fights over bedroom witch hunts. A closing question that any intelligent grade school child could ask: When are Christians going to start living the "love" they drivel about every Sunday.?
