Okay City

George Rekers Has Been A Very Naughty Boy

6 May 2010

Grrrr, Homo, This I Believe | Comments (3)

Okay; before we get started, you have to read this article. In case you’re not up on this whole story.

Done? All right. We’ve got a lot to cover:

I mean, really? It takes a lot of crack to compare yourself to Jesus Christ when you get caught with a GAY MALE PROSTITUTE YOU SORRY SACK OF SHIT WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH HARM YOU’VE WROUGHT IN THIS WORLD WITH YOUR EFFED UP HYPOCRITICAL TEACHINGS? AND THEN TO TRY TO COVER IT UP WITH AN OBVIOUS LIE? WHAT THE FUCK, GEORGE ALAN REKERS?

Whoo, sorry. I had a little moment there. Seriously, though, that guy can suck it. All of NARTH can, really. I know some people who’ve done ex-gay therapy through people with ties to NARTH; it hasn’t ended well for almost any of them. Or, I should say – more than a few of them ended up in psych wards, and a whole bunch more ended up perpetual Peter Pans with a permanent resentment toward the church, authority and responsibility of any kind. Many developed drinking and/or drug problems. Even more had trouble establishing loving, healthy, and trusting relationships with anyone for a long time; some never did. And not a single one of them – NOT ONE - ended up straight, or even well-adjusted. There but for the grace of God go I.

I mean honestly – are we commanded to love well, or just to love correctly? Is love between two people just an IKEA diagram – Phlange A goes in slot B, at Time C? Is that all God has planned for us? Or are we meant to be broken-hearted, open-minded and compassionate?

And how many times is this going to have to happen before the great gathered mass of saints gets it? THIS STUFF DOES NOT WORK. IT’S NOT MEANT TO. It only serves to stunt an individual’s emotional development and turn him into a hypocrite of the highest order, or, at best, an unfeeling, discompassionate Pharisee incapable of imagining a relationship with God outside a strict and unbreachable pattern of behaviors, left to wonder why, if they can do it, why everyone else can’t, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, to come to judge the rest of the world by a harsher measure than the God they claim to serve.

I went through hell and back trying to come to grips with my sexual orientation; so did my husband. So did almost every single gay person I know. Much of that hell was meted out at us in the name of Christ’s love by some of the people we loved and trusted the most. I’ve spent the last ten years of my life healing from that struggle; that I’ve come as far as I have is, for me, a testament to the continuing work of the Holy Spirit in my life (said the guy who just told NARTH to suck it; we’re still a work in progress here, people). Straight people, you have absolutely no idea.

Whether they mean to or not, even if what they say is in almost direct opposition to it, what these groups do is single gay people out as different, as less deserving of God’s love than straight people. They say that we have to go to some extra measure of penance and sanctification that "normal" people do not. Sometimes they’ll say "we’re all sinners," but there’s not a NARTH for guys who are assholes to their wives. There’s no reparative therapy for that. There’s no "ex-I-don’t-have-a-kind-word-in-the-world-to-say-to-anyone" ministries (and believe me, I’m first on the list for that one). I once asked someone I went to church with if he believed in the idea of marital rape; if he believed it existed at all. At the time he was trying to get me to come to a group for guys who were "struggling" with their sexual desires in the church. His answer: "You know, I don’t know if I do or not. I guess I’ve never really thought about it."

Uh, then I don’t want to come to your group for unhappy gay dudes.

And let me just end this by saying the following:

In the last decade of my life I’ve heard it said on more occasions than I can count that my struggle was about gratifying the desires of the flesh – basically, I wanted to have sex and so I performed a whole bunch of mental and theological gymnastics in order to get some. This could! not! be further from the truth. What it was about, if you might indulge me to sound a little melodramatic, was answering the cry of my heart. I’d heard gay people and homosexuality singled out so much as awful and unacceptable in my life, that my heart needed to know I was accepted by God for exactly who I was.

I wish George Rekers knew that. I wish he’d had the safe space I had – the safe space I took, and was given - at 20 to come to peace with who he is. It takes a damaged person to pick up a prostitute, then lie about it, and compare himself to Jesus Christ in the midst of that lie. I can’t begin to imagine what decades of spewing this kind of hatred – which, in the end, he was only spewing at himself – while practicing it on the side must do to a person. I hope his life opens up for him to allow him space to be safe in the knowledge of who he is.

ANYWAY. Here, watch this; as ever, Derek Webb makes my point better than I can:

My First Published Piece of Writing

Writer | Comments (1)

This is my first published piece of writing – a review of Judy Blume’s book Superfudge published in the Weatherford Daily News on Nov. 2, 1989. See, they had this column called Kids Kritics Korner that …

wait. Wait. Does that abbreviate down to KKK?

Oh, balls.

WELL ANYWAY. The KKK came around and got the teachers to recommend students to write book reviews for this column – sort of an encouragement for kids to read kind of thing. Because the KKK is very invested in youth literacy. After your KKKolumn was published, they hung it on the wall in the school next to the principal’s office so everyone could see it.

In all seriousness, I was pretty proud of myself when this came out. I just now realized, just this morning, the KKKonnection. It only took me twenty years.

Of course, the whole thing had no relation to those assholes in the Klu Klux Klan, who are invited personally by me to blow their white supremacy Aryan nation bullshit out their asses.

T-R-O-U-B-L-E

4 May 2010

Photos, Travels | Comments (3)

Wow, I’m in all kinds of trouble about the Tebow thing. Whatever, I stand by it. A new sports column is coming up shortly – something kinder and gentler and generally more nostalgic, because believe it or not, that level of vitriol is something that doesn’t come naturally. I would try to explain more what I meant, or answer some of the criticism, but meh.

In the meantime. We had a good time in Las Vegas. There were some weird and sad moments – Thursday afternoon was spent largely napping, and I laid in bed and cried for a few minutes before falling asleep. Brian and I clung to each other a lot, and we did nothing high-energy. We enjoyed one another’s company; this was the point.

For me, that whole city is a little bit of a writer’s dream, and I mostly go for the people-watching. We saw a woman carrying a half-yard whalebone full of pina colada down the street, about half in the bag, with a toddler balanced on her shoulders, saying drearily, “You need to learn to trust mommy.”

People: Las Vegas is not a place to take your children. It just isn’t. This is another blog post ENTIRELY.

I decided that this time, I didn’t want to haul my big camera around. I took it, just in case I suddenly changed my mind, but other than taking a few photos of our hotel room, it went unused. Instead, I walked around getting some photos with my iPhone and Hipstamatic; the results varied, but I did get some photos I’m very fond of:

This was our first-morning breakfast at Bouchon, inside the Venetian. We have breakfast at least once there every time we go to Vegas. It’s the best breakfast in all of America, probably. No kidding, it’s worth the cost of the trip just for this breakfast.

The Wynn has a patio overlooking a shallow pool with a giant waterfall; it’s my favorite place in all of Las Vegas, because there are comfy sofas, the sun beating down, and a fantastic bar. And it only seats about 20 people, so it’s never very crowded. They had cucumber ginger coolers – Hendrick’s gin, Ginger liqueur, freshly muddled cucumber, agave nectar, and club soda. I had two.

I don’t care if Jesus Christ Himself was inside, I would NEVER stand in line for three hours for a nightclub. Ever. Plenty of people, it seems, will. We actually saw a woman get turned away from one nightclub in the City Center for not having “the right look.” Screw that – let’s go to In & Out Burger.

We didn’t actually go to McDonald’s. But I thought the sign was cool.

Umbrellas

These were hanging inside the shops at the Palazzo; I thought they were pretty.

Taken from our afternoon next to the Venetian pool. It was lovely – sunshine and Mai Tais. I sunburned the backs of my legs; HERE COMES SUMMER!

A gallery in City Center had some great Chihuly pieces. Not as impressive as his stuff at the OKCMOA, but of a somewhat different style than what I’m used to from him.

This is my favorite photograph that I took on this trip, in the Paris Las Vegas. The rest of the photos are at Flickr.

We also saw Lily Tomlin’s show at the MGM Grand. It was amazing, with some pieces from her Laugh-In days, and some monologues adapted from one of my favorite plays of all time, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, written for Tomlin by her partner Jane Wagner. If you haven’t read it – you should. I used to read it once a year; it’s been too long. I think I’ll read it this week.

The point of this trip was relaxation, and I think we got that. Oh, and delicious food; we definitely got that. The best part was that since we flew home Saturday afternoon, we had a whole other day to recover from the rigors of travel before going back to work; this also saved us hundreds of dollars on the cost of the trip in exchange for taking an extra day of vacation.

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