I Am What I Am

I Am What I Am

This was in the third issue of Say What. I wrote it after there was a series of very homophobic letters printed in the local newspaper. The paper only printed one of the retaliation letters that I sent in, the only one that I didn’t clearly identify myself as being gay, go figure.

So, you think it’s a bad thing that I’m queer! Well, for a long time, so did I, but, I got tired of hating myself! You see, what I realized, was that the more I hated myself for this “defect” in my nature, the more I hated the world around me. Lucky for me that I don’t have a violent nature, otherwise, that anger could have landed me in some pretty nasty situations! As it is, repairing the damage to my self-esteem is taking enough work to fill a couple lifetimes. I don’t blame people who feel repulsed by the thought of two men being intimate with each other, they had the same cultural taboos programmed into them that I did, and these programs are not easily overcome. I feel that recognizing the damage they have done is the first step in overcoming these misguided morals. The media frequently portrays serial killers and demented psychopaths as repressed homosexuals, much to the dismay of the gay community and our supporters, but I actually think there is a point to be made here; if these gay people had not had their nature repressed, would they not have ended up a little less angry at the world? Maybe the reason that there is so many of these stories around is because our society has not yet accepted something that is integral to human nature, and that through ridicule and hatred, have turned these fellow human beings into self-despising outcasts, who, quite naturally feel the impulse to lash out at the society in which they are trapped ( or, as is more often the case, engaging in extremely self-destroying behaviour)! What I guess I want to make clear is that homosexuality is not abnormal, it’s a part of us all, it exists in all cultures (whether accepted or not) through out time, if we don’t learn to accept it, it will just be another of the myriad of things that are leading mankind to the brink of self-destruction.

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