Flesh And Blood

http://aspectsofagaymanslifeinverse.blogspot.com/

Today’s poem has been inspired by tales told me by young people whose Coming Out experience was no way as tough an experience as they expected. Me, I did not feel I could confide in my family and only told my mother a few years before she died.  I was in and out of the damn closet for years, trusting relatively few people with the knowledge that I am gay, before I finally came out to stay in the early 1980s. [Gay relationships ‘between consenting adults’ were decriminalised in the UK in 1967.]

The poem last appeared on the blog in 2010 and is repeated today for all those gay boys and girls, men and women who have found coming out to family and friends something of a traumatic experience. As my blogs are read worldwide, hopefully gay people whose socio-cultural-religious origins will not allow them to be openly gay, might take heart in the fact that no civilised person sees sexual identity as unnatural, criminal or sinful; it is simply part of our whole identity, albeit an integral part, but it is the whole that really counts. Picking on someone for their sexuality is like claiming to have completed a jigsaw puzzle with much of it still missing, and only a very foolish person does that...

It is easier to be openly gay if you are growing up in a gay-friendly environment, but many of us don’t so it is can be really tough on everyone concerned. Even so, it is well worth it if only for personal peace of mind. If it means having to move away from family and friends and getting a life while they mull things over, so be it.

Sadly, it can take some people a long time to shake off the worst of the outdated, misleading and often offensive stereotypes that continue to attach themselves to gay people in the minds of the less enlightened among the heterosexual majority. But if any family members or so-called ‘friends’ really can’t see that we’re still the same person for coming out of the damn closet they put us in ...well, maybe we are better off without them. 

Believe me. It gets easier for most people...family, friends, and us too! I guess it goes with the territory, learning to fit in to our sexuality like a hand to a glove, and then, before we know it, as a hand to the body with which nature has blessed us.

Oh, but if only those blinkered leaders in countries where gay relationships remain a criminal offence would accept that sexuality is as natural as each breath we take and we can make a valuable contribution to our native society, especially failing societies; invariably, these are hosted by repressive regimes and/or have the ear of religious fundamentalists. [So-called ‘Christian’ evangelical pastors around the world, especially those still relentlessly inciting hate crime across much of Africa, take note!]

Yes, I know I have said it all before. But as my dear late mother used to say, if something is worth saying, it is always worth repeating. Mind you, the old adage is so true; there are none so deaf as will not hear or so blind that will not see. I guess we just have to try and make them...

Did I say it would be easy?

FLESH AND BLOOD

When we told my parents

we are gay and in love,

the looks they flung us said it all

their words fraught

with anger, pain and distress,

urging us to think again

about just what it would mean

to fly in the face of religion,

insult God - and for what?

Desires of the flesh

overriding all human decency

(unnatural at that)

When we told your parents

we are gay and in love,

the looks they flung us said it all,

tumbling over words

conveying their happiness,

hopes that we will

know the same joys of love

that had been theirs

for years - and for what?

Desires of the flesh

mindful of all human decency

playing its part

When my parents met yours

over dinner one night,

the looks they flung each other

did not augur well

for an entertaining evening

but yours won mine over

with their no-nonsense talking

about living, loving,

sharing - and for what?

Desires of the flesh

with all that’s good and decent

at its heart

Copyright R. N. Taber 2010

[Note: This poem appears in Tracking the Torchbearer by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2012.]