I've come to the conclusion that revolution is necessary. I'll feel differently tomorrow. But revolution can be nothing but good. Right?
I just watched the recently released documentary "for the Bible tells me so." It felt like the story of me - a story that I want to share with the world. I cannot recommend it enough. If you want to view a copy, let me and I will get it to you - I've e-mailed the maker and asked for a digital copy. If that doesn't go through, I will get several copies.
Then the revolution can begin. It has to. The church cannot be a part of hate, hate that leads to suicide, suicide that leads to death and pain. This is not God. God cannot accept this. As I have said before, this is because God is everything but Hate.
If he exists.
I wonder what my life is like in a post-gay existence; where it is simply part of me rather than the central aspect of my thought. My everyday, simple, natural existence. I cannot wait for the fact that women don't make sexual sense to me to be open.
But it isn't going to happen right away. Can you imagine this conversation? This is the conversation parents know is coming, that parents don't want to have. This is the conversation that children know is coming, but that children know they have to have - this is the moment at which one admits that one is NOT the same. For biological reasons. For reasons that cannot be recognized by sight, but for biological reasons.
A couple nights ago I couldn't sleep. My parents had been out of town, and coming home the day after. I was crippled with fear, feeling that the moment for this conversation had come. (I realize this moment has been coming for 22 years, and still hasn't materialized. I'm working on that. Give me time, and a couple shots of tequila at a coffee shop.) I stayed up late, writing a series seven of spastic poems. I don't do this. Write, or write poetry. Music is my method. But words tortured me.
This is intimate stuff. It can get intimate. But I am going to retype it here for you. You may not like it - I'm not Leonard Cohen, William Blake, or Shakespeare. I'm only Neal Robert Adolph. And I don't really know what I am saying, except that there is truth in it.
I. Misery makes sense to a gay man, because nobody knows his name unless they read his birth certificate.
And even then they only know his name.
Happiness confuses me.
It is unfamiliar and frightening.
Misery feels like home.
II. I'll sit around my home, reading about God,
and wishing that my friends were not so inspired by him.
Because I am impressionable and lonely.
What inspires them can temporarily inspire me.
Because I am lonely.
Even when I am inspired, I know God doesn't exist.
Why would he want to.
III. I am so capable of allowing fear to paralyze me.
I can't imagine what it is like to feel somebodies lips on yours.
I propose it is like encountering God for the first time.
Like heroin. So damn good. So false. fleeting. Never to be captured again.
I want somebody to play with my arm hair.
Caress the hair on my thigh.
Is it actually electrifying? Does it paralyze? Will I even like it?
These thoughts arrest me. Why be something that I am not convinced I will enjoy?
IV. A confession is always on one's mind, but never on one's lips. The fear of rejection prevents words to form in the mouth that they have lived in for years.
They are nesting.
They aren't interested in learning how to fly.
Because escape from prison is only tempting when the sun is out, and a rainbow is in the sky.
And even then the nesting cage is familiar. Safe, dark and lonely, but familiar. It makes sense. Just like misery.
Misery makes sense to a confession.
V. Nobody hates a gay man quite as much as he hates himself.
VI. I've written novels about myself a dozen times. The first one was written in 2003. I was 17, and I was about to commit suicide. The words never materialized, but the novel was written.
In the style of a disappointing romance novel. Lots of lust. No sex.
VII. I say to you, O protector of children from freedom their parents do not desire,
to you, O protector of adults from freedoms their God does not desire,
to you, O protector of mine, sitting in your fortification north of Saskatoon.
You are bastards for letting me lie.
I'm sorry for blaming you.
I may have fallen in love with Bishop Desmond Tutu. A man, across an ocean, and of elderly blood. He says this, and it is sexy. "I can't, for the life of me, imagine that God would say, 'I will punish you because you are black. You should have been white. I will punish you because you are a woman. You should have been a man. I punish you because you are homosexual. You should have been heterosexual.' I can't - I can't for the life of me believe that is how God sees people."
The God of Desmond Tutu is sexy.
