On being gay

What is it? What is it Ive got? It’s a hunger, a desire, an overarching and compulsive need and want for something that is put to one side and ignored by a mind which cant fathom the possibility that it could happen to me. I don’t want it, I used to say, don’t think about it. You have to marginalize, subside and bring to the front of your mid what everyone else thinks about. What ten thousand years and more of human culture has told us is right. It’s the weight of our species, the crucible of a hundred million and countless poems, a thousand billion plays and books and stories, from great orator to a secret to your closest friend, the very existence of our civilisation is based upon a mans unbending, all consuming, for ever adoring love of a woman.

To be excluded from civilisation by something beyond our control. Left out of the joke, not told the story, I don’t get it. I can’t comprehend it. Why not? What’s wrong with me? Its sick and gross and perverted and a disease and will destroy our very way of life. That’s how they stop you from thinking about it, no not from thinking about it, they force you push it down so far in the depths of your soul, so far that if you ignore it for too long it will begin to consume you and then you will be dead. Or they scare you with what they have scared everyone in all of history with, the fear of forever damnation. You’re going to burn, all eternity in the depths of hell and you will never see God, so don’t ever do it. Don’t ever act upon that thing. Don’t even listen to it. See the man you want, fantasise about everything about him, his lips and body and the love he could give you for all the time you have together, but keep it all in here because we don’t want to think about it. They don’t want to see something so different, which is so obviously against all of our collective past. So desperately not right.

But I want it. I have to have it. You see I cant live without love. Who on earth can live a life not theirs, but one of being completely devoid of a tender and caring lovers touch, either never to experience it, or to be so fleeting and wrong that to convulse in shameless guilt and despair and despise that you let that vicious monster out of the box. How on Gods earth can you live with a giant crunched down inside you? It cannot be shoved down beneath your consciousness for the rest of your breaths. How can it, how could you do that. Actively live a life of death. Just a shell, just a broken can of a shell that is going to crumble under the weight of illicit thoughts one day.

Or it will, just like a devilish monster in a fairytale; it will rip its way out through your gut, and catch and kill the nearest thing it can get its hands on. People must have tried for all time to control the beast. Let it out once in a while; let it out, but only when no one is watching. Don’t let anyone see the monster. Because when someone sees that you have a monster, then you are singled out, feared and hated and despised by all sorts around this world that this monster picked you. People can say it is going to go away, or they can say you have to ignore it, or they can try and tear the beast out of your sinews, but it never goes away.

There is only one way to survive. You have to let the beast out. Have is not strong enough to describe how much of a necessity it is that this monster is let out to do its own thing. You see the moment you acknowledge you have monster, the sooner you realise its there, and not going anywhere, ever, and no matter what the people say around the planet, some people have monsters and some don’t, but you do. And you see, the very second you say hello to the beast, and acknowledge that it is there, it goes away, never to return as something you should be afraid of.

It is gone forever, the monster, the beast, the all consuming hatred and rage and fear and want, the disgusting want that tears and scratches at your mind till it drives you to insanity, it just goes away, slips into your being, when you say its there. Not a monster no more, not a sin or a cruel trick, just you, what you are and forever will be. Just a part of you. Just nothing else to worry about, its just that you had a beast, but you defeated it invincibly just by knowing it was there. You aren’t giving in to it, you aren’t letting it win, lying down for it to tramp all over you, the exact opposite, you beat it, you win because you control it. You are gay. Everyone knows it now. So what does it matter now. You’ve won the battle for your life. Everyone can say anything, a million things and a half about a thousand and a half centuries of a civilisation about a man that loves a woman. They can say it all, but it doesn’t matter. All of them are completely and utterly afraid. They do not know this beast, they have absolutely no idea what it is or how to control it, so they fight it forever, they shout at it and thy call it a sin, this beast. Or they have the beast, somewhere deep inside them, and they think they can win by attacking it head on, with words and fists and laws, but it wont go away for them, because the beast has beat them. But for us, us who have conquered the shadowy fear of lies, know we are winners, we know we have won our own personal battles, and unlike the millions who fear it, unlike a million decades of our way of life, we know who we are, and we can never be afraid to say so, we can never shake or waiver from the one true thing we know. We have it, a love to give, an amazing life to live with someone who is of our same sex, and we know it because one day, a little while ago, we won the war for our minds. And I can never forget that, you must always remember that we are stronger. Love, a necessity of life; that we are proud of the battle we have won, and we know who we are, and I know who I am and I know who I love and I am the same as you so let me live, a million years gone and a million more to come, and all the grace of God and all the power of collective humanity is screaming let me be, for I have won, for I am proud of what I have accomplished, and just let me live.