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4.23.2005
SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 2005
Sex Addiction
There is an epidemic of sexual addiction in the gay community. It may well exist in the straight community too, but I'm not close enough to it to know. It is the biggest problem that confronts gay people, in large part because no one seems willing to talk about it. To talk about sexual addiction is to be a prude, or worse, a conservative sympathizer. It's no different than the way conservatives call those who are against the war anti-patriotic. You either keep your mouth shut about sex and circuit parties and bare-backing, or you're a traitor to the gay cause. Ironically, to encourage young men to a young death from AIDS, or a wasted life from an endless string of meaningless sexual encounters, is no treason. It's "freedom." It is no freedom to be on protease inhibitors at the age of 25. Those of us over 27, who have seen the death toll of the 80s and 90s, and who have toiled in the fields of our own self-hatred until we found a way out, have a responsibility to young gay people. A responsibility to speak the truth. To tell them that there is a life of love and freedom and creativity and dreams beyond the realm of sexual escapism and addiction. To tell them that they will not find what they are looking for on the destructive road they are traveling. But that there is a road where they can be fully themselves - where they can fully express their sexuality, and have all their dreams come true as well and be proud of who they are. That road is called awareness and recovery. It is real and it is possible. And it awaits all those with the courage to travel it.
We understand why you hate yourself. Who wouldn't, growing up in this culture where state legislatures call you inhuman, where national leaders are trying to amend the constitution to keep you from loving. But the answer to those who hate you is not to hate yourself. It is to love yourself. Sexual addiction is not love. It may look like it in the heat of the moment. But from a wiser perspective, it is the destruction of your life, masquerading as something good for you.
It's time to start talking about it. It's time to start doing something about it.
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4.22.2005
FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 2005
Three Hundred Billion Dollars
A report from the Associated Press yesterday says that the war and occupation and reconstruction efforts in Iraq have cost $300 billion, or a third of a trillion dollars. For this amount, almost every expert would agree, we could have instead ended hunger and hunger-related disease in the world for at least the next five years, and possibly permanently, saving somehwere in the area of ten million to fifteen million lives every year, or we could have arrested AIDS mortality for the next ten years, saving at least 30 million lives.
Anyone that tells you thast what we have done with the money instead makes sense is simply delusional.
That this was a tragic waste of money is not something we have not heard over and over again by those on the left. What I am hoping to focus on is the fact that the people we look up to as "experts", not only on the right, but those on the left who have fallen in line to defend the war for the sake of public opinion, don't know what they are doing or what they are talking about. We must never subjugate our imaginations to their intellects.
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4.20.2005
THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 2005
An Unspeakable Act of Hatred
Yesterday, as you may have read, the Texas House of Representatives voted to ban gays and lesbians from adopting children or being foster parents to children. It is an unspeakable act of hatred. It seems that in this age where Jesus is becoming more and more popular Jesus's teachings and spirit are becoming more and more rejected. As are the foundations of our nation - "We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
They are playing with the straw that will break the camel's back on this one down in Texas. They take their power for granted. They do not know that you can only go so far in treading on a man's, or a woman's, dignity, and once you have crossed that line, you open the floodgates of tomorrow, and the arc of moral history, which, as Martin Luther King said, is long, but bends toward justice, comes crashing down on you so fast you don't know what hit you. Just ask Stalin, or Hitler, or Pinochet, or any of the other great symbols of hatred in recent history. If this is what's in their hearts then I'm glad they have done it. They are moving us closer and faster to the day when their day will be done.
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WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20, 2005
God and Joe
Apparently the new Pope has written that all other religions are "seriously deficient." What an unfortunate view. I had this image yesterday of God talking to all of us at some point, retrospectively. It was saying something like:
"You all tried so hard to come up with the right beliefs, and I know you were only trying to protect me, and I love you for it. No one was right. You were all pretty far off about what I wanted you to do and didn't want you to do and about what I would do to you if you didn't get it right. You were all so afraid of me and this made me very sad. But you tried so hard. It pained me to see how hard you were trying, but at the same time it gave me all the more love for you to see how important it was to you that you honored that which created you. I love you all, and I love you all equally. I wish you could have figured out that what I really wanted was for you to love yourselves - not be so hard on yourselves, so punishing in your own minds of your every move and your every decision, and mostly, of your own deficiencies. I can see now how it was so difficult for you to love one another, because you couldn't really bring yourselves to love your own self. That's OK. You were trying to do what you thought was right, and your fear of getting it wrong drove you to hurt yourselves. But I never doubted for a moment that you were all in awe of what ever created you. From where I stand, I could see what you couldn't - that you all very much wanted to honor the same thing - even you Pope Benedict XVI, or Joe, as I like to call you - you were pretty way off, but I love you too."
Even to this I think God would say, "nice try, but pretty far off still - you have a limited imagination, but that's OK too - I gave it to you."
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4.19.2005
TUESDAY, APRIL 19, 2005
Olympia High School
Yesterday I had the special privilege of speaking to several hundred students at Olympia High School in Orlando, Florida on the subject of staying true to oneself and staying true to one's dreams. The talk was organized by a really great young teacher there named Chris Markl, who impressed me from the start when he wrote back in the fall to describe how he had organized a group of 150 students to go to the polls and vote on election day. To say it is a good thing for the soul to see young people out there getting involved and giving their all to make the world a better place is an understatement. There is an unmitigated spirit of possibility in Chris's work and in his person that cannot help but boost one's own sense that another world is possible. And the students who came up to talk afterward only added to that.
Young people don't "know" that they can't change the world. Young people have not resigned themselves to the idea that things like war and hunger and violence will always exist. They are full of ideas and energy about how we can solve the great problems of the world. They are too new to this world to have given up on it yet. Their perspective is closer to the truth than an adult perspective, because it is more grounded in possibility and in the basic truth - truth that history has borne out - that civilization is the product of surprises - the likes of which the cynics never take into account - like the fall of apartheid, the appearance of a Martin Luther King on the horizon, the ability of a Gandhi to spark the ignition of all of India's imagination, and so many others. Young people know that we can change the world, and that we can do it in our lifetime. This knowledge is more profound than all the volumes written by all the experts who say otherwise.
Thanks to you Chris and all the students at Olympia for an incredible day of inspiration. What I came to give I got back in spades.
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MONDAY, APRIL 18, 2005
Expertise
"The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both psychologically and theologically false, and at least an error in faith." - Roman Catholic Church, 17th Century
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