Just a Question of Love

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Today’s poem  is from my gay-interest blog archives for April 2012 and takes its title from a delightful and moving gay movie of the same name (in translation) Juste une Question d’Amour; it was first shown on French television in January 2000.

There was a time, especially in the 1980's and early 1990's, that Channel 4 here showed a variety of mainstream gay films, but we rarely see any on British television these days. [By mainstream, I mean an alternative to the kind of soft porn stuff that’s easy enough to come by. No worries there, but I for one enjoy a good story line with believable characters. Titles like The Torchsong Trilogy, Beautiful Thing, Get Real and Brokeback Mountain instantly spring to mind...]

Only relatively rarely do we even hear any discussion on gay issues here, either on TV or radio. Could it be that broadcasters are afraid of offending the less enlightened among the heterosexual majority, increasing in numbers all the time in a multicultural society in which various socio-cultural-religious hang-ups invariably include homophobia?

Now, as I have said many times, love does not discriminate so why should anyone? Sometimes I wonder, are we really living in the 21^st century?

Even nowadays, many gay people are made to feel they have to choose between sexuality and family, friends, culture, entire home environment. No one should have to make such a choice anywhere in the world. and no one has the right to impose it on anyone else. To each, their own, of course, but we can agree to differ without going into hostile overdrive, surely?

 Whatever our gender, race, religion, sexuality, disability, age etc. - oh, and politics as well - .we are a common humanity; as such, we need to start treating people we consider 'different' with the same respect we would ask them to pay us. Ageism, sexism, racism, homophobia....there is far too much of such prejudices across the world, as damaging in our Here-and-Now as climate change to our futures, for young people especially since it will be they, not us, who will be expected to bear the long-term consequences. 

Wake up, world, and get real!

This poem is a villanelle.

JUST A QUESTION OF LOVE 

As spring rain from above

on Earth Mother in pain;

it's just a question of love

As push comes to shove,

so love into its own,

as spring rain from above

The healing wing of a dove

will learn to fly again;

it’s just a question of love

Love has nothing to prove;

a bigot’s loss, its gain,

as spring rain from above

See a hand torn from glove

beat cold and pain;

it’s just a question of love

If nature’s sexuality prove

as precious a bane

as spring rain from above,

it’s just a question of love

Copyright R. N. Taber 2010

[From: On the Battlefields of Love by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2010]