For those of us who are different by virtue of our homosexuality, the journey to a place of feeling good about ourselves is often a long and difficult one. Finding peace of mind, companionship and acceptance is sometimes an even greater challenge. We're taught from the time we're little, that our particular kind of different isn't OK in the scheme of things. So we invest an inordinate amount of our youthful energies trying to change into something we're not - an undertaking which by now, most of us have come to understand is simply impossible.
When I was younger, I hated my curly hair and did everything humanly possible to get rid of it. But it always grew back in curly and I finally surrendered myself to the fact that I was always going to have curly hair. I can put contact lenses in my eyes to turn them from blue to brown but my eyes will still always be blue no matter how they might appear to other people. I can use tanning lotion on my skin to make it darker but I will still always have white skin. And all the peroxide in the world isn't going to change the fact that when the roots of my hair grow in, they're still going to be a mousy blonde.
Such is the nature of the anomaly we call homosexuality. It cannot be defended because genetic coding is indefensible. Yet there are those who would persist in forcing us to defend it simply because we don't yet understand what causes it. Imagine asking an albino to defend themselves because of the lack of pigmentation in their skin. Or telling a child with Down Syndrome that their chromosomal difference is no excuse and that that he or she just needs to try harder to be normal. Or telling a person that's been blind from birth, that if they really put their heart and soul into it, that one day they'll be able to see just like everybody else.
But this is what religion tells us today - that if those of us who are homosexual just try hard enough, choose carefully enough and pray hard enough, that we too can be like the majority of people who are heterosexual; that somehow the nature of our creation can be overcome by simply desiring it to be so. If desire were all it took to change from homosexual to heterosexual, then most of the world's homosexual population wouldn't exist because most of us at one time or another, have desired with all of our hearts to be anything other than homosexual.
I know that for the average heterosexual person, homosexuality is at best, impossible to understand. And I can appreciate that because there are many things in this world that I don't understand. I look at people who go to boxing matches or watch them on TV and can't for the life of me understand what the attraction is. I see people who have taken a vow of celibacy and gone off to live in a monastery - giving up all that is worldly and pleasurable to serve their god. And here again, I cannot fathom why.
I see guys driving through the mountains with a deer strapped to their vehicle and don't understand what it is that motivates them to kill for sport. I see a lot of things that a lot of people do that make no sense to me and that I will probably never understand. But what I do understand, is that not everybody is like me and I try to make room in my thoughts for the fact that someone being different from me doesn't make them bad. It just makes them different.
I would never expect a person who isn't homosexual to understand what it means to be homosexual. But I would hope that they recognize that it's my reality and that it's neither good or bad, right or wrong, but simply what is. And then try and find a way of being OK with it because it's what works for me.
I see Hassidic Jews walking to their Synagogues on Saturday mornings in the summer wearing long black coats and fur hats and have no idea how or why they would choose to do that. But I do understand that it's what works for them and respect their choice to live according to their heart's desires.
There is comfort in sameness, of being a part of a community that believes and acts and manifests as we do. There seems to be a tendency among human beings to want to homogenize - to get everything and everybody to look and act and feel the same so that comfort may be obtained through sameness. Differences are challenging, while sameness comforts precisely because it doesn't challenge.
Many housing developments today have strict rules that dictate exactly what kind of a tree may be planted in the front yard, how much of that yard may be planted in grass and what color the house that accompanies that yard may be painted. It's all part and parcel of an effort to blend away all of the differences so that no one is forced to deal with them - as if differences were something much too awful for the average person to bear.
Maybe it's part of a reaction to the fact that this country has brought together so many different cultures and races, that comfort in sameness can no longer be taken for granted. In many other countries around the world, there is often a natural uniformity of race, religion and cultural expression within a given boundary. But here in America we have become a gigantic minestrone with virtually every conceivable representation blended into the mix. And not everybody is comfortable with that. The discomfort with our differences reaches and grows and extends itself into every aspect of our lives to the point where even the slightest hint of uniqueness is seen as threatening. And it seems to be primarily the white, Christian majority that is most uncomfortable with those who are not like unto themselves.
Religion, which depends on conformity for control, is usually at the forefront of the effort to homogenize away the differences between people. Nowhere can this be seen more conspicuously than in Mormonism, which at its furthest reaches, dictates what kind of underwear its members wear and what kind of sex is appropriate between married couples. If you can control people where they sex, then you've got them. When it comes to Mormonism, blending away people's differences is more about control than it is comfort, although comfort becomes the pheromone that helps to keep people attracted and involved. But for those who don't subscribe to any particular religion, there is still the overlapping effect of religion on the culture that deeply influences their ability to be tolerant of those who are different than the norm.
So we find ourselves living in a culture where there is enormous diversity - perhaps the greatest diversity that exists on the planet - and yet we seem to be less tolerant of that diversity than any other group of people. It is no secret that Christian zealots would like to wash every one down and make them god-fearing Christians like themselves. A nation of puritans who think, speak, act and worship all in the same way.
They tried to exterminate the Native Americans and came pretty close to succeeding. When they had all of them either dead or safely rounded up on reservations, they went after the Blacks. When they could no longer keep them as slaves, they tried to relegate them to a position of second-class citizenship. And when that failed and Blacks were finally recognized as being equal under the law, the white Christians were for a time, left without an adversary. But it didn't take them long to find another group of people towards whom they could direct their animosity.
Because gay men and lesbians don't fit within the Christian framework of acceptability, they have become a target for extermination. This follows predictably, the Christian tradition of needing to have everybody believe and live as they do or be subject to all-out political and cultural annihilation. It goes back to the Inquisition and winds its way slowly and surely into the present along a sad and bloody path; be like us or be subject to our wrath.
The eponymous religion that supposedly sprung from a Jew named Jesus, is determined to wash away all of our differences in the name of their god. It's not a holy war, contrary to what they say. It's an effort to minimize the differences between human beings so that comfort may be gained through sameness. When all of the fish in a school are swimming in the same direction, it certainly makes for a more orderly, comfortable journey. But not all of the fish in the ocean are the same and the idea that a school of sardines must behave in every way like a school of north sea salmon, is the same kind of flawed thinking that would expect all human beings to live, believe and act as one.
The differences between human beings are never going to go away and the best we can hope for is a unity of thought when it comes to respecting those differences. A homosexual is not going to stop being a homosexual because religion doesn't like them - just like an olive tree is not going to stop being an olive tree because a lot of people don't like what happens when their fruit drops onto their sidewalks and lawns. When gathered and pressed, those same olives that make a mess on somebody's lawn, give us the richness of an oil that livens our food and nourishes our bodies. It's all in the way we make do with what is.
The origins of our differences may forever remain a mystery to us. But what is not a mystery, is that human beings have an almost infinite number of ways in which they're different one from another. The question each one of us has to ask ourselves, is why are we so uncomfortable with these differences? Why is it so important to us that everybody believe and act as we do? Why do we want all of the houses and lawns on our street to look exactly the same? What are we afraid of?
Why do I need you, to be exactly like me?
Copyright 2003 by Tom Clark
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