The old man meditating at sunrise is not me. It’s an AI image.
About a week ago, I sat on a park bench watching a protest in the city — mainly young people, loud and passionate, demonstrating against new laws limiting free speech. Watching them, I felt something settle in me: it’s time to pass on the baton. They’re doing well. Making mistakes, probably, but so did we — the boomers who in 1968 genuinely believed the world revolution had finally begun. At this point in my life, I think I’m better suited to the role in that picture. Though I may need to work on my physique.
Silence suits older people. It can even be golden. But a story on the ABC a few days ago disturbed me enough to break it.
Youths claiming allegiance to IS were bashing gay teenage boys and insisting that what they were doing was not a sin. It brought to mind a photograph I once saw of a young girl holding a placard that read, “God Hates Gays.” Wrong, I thought — wrong in every way possible. Simply put, God cannot hate. If He could, He would not be God. He would be the other one.
There is another dimension to these bashings worth considering. If a characteristic appears consistently within a species and at a stable proportion across populations, it is reasonable to assume that the characteristic serves a function in the survival of the whole. In human communities, we need only look at where homosexual men and women have historically concentrated to get a sense of what that function might be. Culture, education, and the military — in each, their contributions have been significant and often decisive. The military may surprise people, but across cultures and centuries, you find outstanding commanders who were, or can reasonably be assumed to have been, homosexual. The right person, in other words, for a particular kind of job.
I should be honest about my own position. My feelings on this are coloured by a youth partially spent as a street boy — not hatred, just a residual unease I’ve never entirely reasoned away. I remember, perhaps ten years after returning to Australia, finishing work on the night of the Mardi Gras parade and deciding to take a look. I lasted twenty minutes. Walking away toward the train station, a strange image came to me: the wounded thigh of an ancient horseman, bleeding, on a black horse slick with sweat. Battle. A different homosexuality entirely.
That image has stayed with me. I’m still not sure what to do with it, except to say that reducing any human complexity to a placard — whether one of hatred or of celebration — has always struck me as a way of not really looking at all.