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THE REAL JERSEY SHORE

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WHY PIGS CAN'T FLY

As I melted into the bed after my first gay sexual experience--some 5 hours around the world with a 25-year-old hairy beast named Claudio--I sensed a completely unfamiliar and yet wonderfully familiar feeling.   It was something very different from post-coital bliss.  It was a special emotion and psychological state that I had never before in my 40 years experienced: an almost joyful sense of wholeness and normalcy.  And it wasn't until I'd embraced my natural sexuality and accepted it as something beautiful and precious that I would begin to emerge from a life of psychosis, repression, agony, alienation and heart-numbing relentless fear.  I had found the beginning  of myself.  It would take a few more years to puzzle it all out and become comfortable in my own skin, but it would come.

About six months after I had come out, one of best friends, Roberta, turned to me one day and said:  "I had no idea there was a real human being in there.  It's nice to finally meet him."

And it is that understanding that sometimes leaves me full of sadness for ex-gays.  Pigs can't fly without wings; but the good news is that sometimes pigs can grow them.  I did.  It takes time, self-examination, honesty and the support of friends.

How do we communicate this simple truth to the straight world and particularly to Christians so that they can appreciate the profound and destructive horror of what they are doing when the characterize ex-gayness as anything other than severe psychological abuse?

Surely, no God would want that for his creations.

The American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have made this clear to Christian America--but in Christian America delusion trumps reason and fact.

The ongoing torture endured by so many Christian children and broken adults makes this clear.  Why will they not listen?  Why do they chose misery, incompleteness and a life of unexamined and un-lived?  What kind of god or religion demands such a thing?

Until a man comes to terms with his own nature and finds love in his heart for himself, life is something he sees with blurry and disorienting tunnel vision.  He ends up in dark alleys, jail cells, destroying his family, disillusioning his friends and denying himself the full gift of his own humanity.

In a recent newspaper column by a professional ex-gay describing coming out of homosexuality, he makes two telling points: the first is his emerging love of loving women.  His complete lack of eroticism in his description of his newly discovered heterosexuality is painfully sad.  I did not discover lust or pre-cum until I was 40, but my own obsession with heterosexuality gave me the "strength" to construct a sex life and a marriage that more resembled some kind of Lego land that anything natural or erotic.

"Anything is possible," writes our ex-gay.  "With the right kind of understanding girl, who loves me and possesses pragmatism and patience, I can picture myself as a good husband and dad."

Secondly, this crippled gentleman drips with homophobia, revealing a persistent and penetrating hatred of his own nature that warps his humanity like an overdose of botox.

Perhaps the most outrageous "disclaimer" he makes is how he once resisted a sexual advance in a sex club from "homosexual rights campaigner Peter Tathchell."  It is an interesting conclusion:  if you reject the sexual advances of a man you do not find attractive you must be a heterosexual, latently-speaking--frantically scrambling for proof of heterosexuality in gay sex club.

Our writer than notes that even the great homosexual work E. M. Forster’s Maurice calls for tolerance, not parity.  "Civil partnerships really are little more than theatrical shams involving men making a point in matching wedding cravats, of embarrassed grandparents and monstrously camp multi-tier cakes.   I wince when gays describe boyfriends as “husbands”, subverting a solemn institution created to provide stability for child-rearing.  Besides, it seems highly perverse that gays should fight for freedom from the bonds of heterosexual morality and then set to copying their oppressors by creating similar contracts of their own.  I was never convinced of my sexuality. True, I never liked football or fighting and I do make a beautifully light Victoria sponge when the need arises. But I shamble like a bloke, I burp and fart without shame and I’ve never really got Barbra Streisand. There was a little voice, lost long ago in the drowning din of my homosexuality, that still called quietly; the smothered, smaller voice of a boy who liked girls."

I suspect this is one pig who may never grow wings--and quite seriously, this hurts me.  I was there once and it is a life that makes the Dorian Gray's portrait seem lovely by comparison.  Freedom to self-destruct and ruin many other lives in the descent is one American freedom, that must one day be thoughtfully addressed.  It is an ignored mental illness that has even corrupted and damaged our government and the civil rights of all Americans.  Imagine what a better place America would have been if certain pigs had grown wings:  Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, Larry Craig, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn and Tom Cruise--to name but a few.

So you are wondering if I'm going to answer the question:  Why can't pigs fly?

The answer is fear.

MANRIFF

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