Gays and Culture – Part II

by Taylor Smith 08.Jan.10

Last week, I left you with a teaser on three famous names of individuals who are gay. David Kopuy – NFL Running Back, Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci, artists and Mathematical theorists.

If you watch American television, you would also, likely, be acquainted with these famous guys: Lady Gu Gu – American dance music artist, nominated for a Grammy this year, singers Joan Boez, American Idol winner Clay Aiken, Lance Boss of NSYNC, Marlon Brando – Oscar winning actor, designer (you might be wearing his clothes right now), Yves Saint Laurent, Actresses: Anna Nicole Smith, and Ellen DeGeneres.{{more}}

Who are the gay cultural icons in St. Vincent?

None who is completely out of the closet. Yet you may spot them onstage or in the newspapers. As long as it’s not obvious, you tolerate them, somewhat barely.

What difference will it make if they were out?

On a related issue, homosexual scandals make the news here, and when these gays are out, their lives become living hell. Are they not the same person as you knew before? Didn’t you use to shake their hands, smile with them? Share the warmth of their gay (happy) company?

For a large percentage of the population, outed homosexuals are ostracized. It is hypocritical indeed, no matter how you look at it.

Another issue in the news is that of men sleeping with men for money. You find a lot of men who ostracize gays in the daylight are at night soliciting rich men for prostitution, whether or not they are sexual during these immoral encounters, as they are in fact, they assuage a homophobic conscience with the rationalization that ‘I did it for money, I am not gay!’ This is called being in DENIAL.

Take the ‘Broke back Mountain’ movie phenomenon as an example. When it played in St. Vincent at (the now defunct) Cinerama, only female moviegoers attended. It points to a serious ‘educational’ lapse as regards the especially young Vincentian male. Worldwide, it ranked eighth among the highest grossing romantic dramas of all time. One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the raw eloquence of the story line as it relates to the homosexual in the closet scene (America 1960s, St. Vincent 2010s). These men both have straight relationships, but connect in the vast, natural mountain scene for a love that endures 20 years, fractured, and triumphant as their commitment to each other is.

It is cultural events like this one which promote tolerance, understanding and an epiphanous courage for viewers like Ledger and Gyllenhaal in the closet of the traditional type of love.

What would moviegoers have done if the love interests in TITANIC had been gay males or females? Would they have shunned that particular classic? ‘Brokeback Mountain’ ranks just seven places behind it worldwide. Here it ranked bottom place. Ah! ‘There is something rotten in the state …’

GAYS AND RELIGION

Reading of the biblical account of David and Jonathan, we are told: David loved Jonathan as his soul? Was perhaps a hidden truth of their relationship edited out of the Bible? Those are strong words indeed ‘as his soul’?

Still on the religious theme, the Roman Catholic Church, as part of its doctrines, requires that priests be celibate. (If you read last week’s article, you would recall, I said that many depressed homosexuals become priests and often sincerely so.)

I don’t know what the situation is here in St. Vincent with our Roman Catholic diocese, but rumours, whether true or not, indicate in my experience that one such priest was caught with a boy, and another left a job to pursue the priesthood abroad.

The universality – it seems – of prevalent homosexuality among males is no more evident than in the worldwide charade of celibacy that are priests.

There have been 11,000 allegations, 1950-2002, of alleged abuse, in which 81 percent of the complainants were young boys, as young as seven years old in some cases. This is most indeed the ‘madness of God’ from Khalil Gibran’s famous poem, but it is clear insanity. The Catholic Church has paid $2.6 billion in damages to law suits, especially emerging in 2002-3 with the famous case of John Gaugin which revealed cover-ups by Bishops who knew what transpired and reported it to no one.

Is the church then about money? Or is it about truth. Why priests – sincere no doubt most of them, go the route of child abuse, needs to be examined by the church.

Next week, this series closes with an interview with a Vincentian homosexual.