As I see the U.S. wend its way to the Right, I do experience a fair amount of anger. Some readers have offered their opinion that my anger is non-Buddhist. They may be correct. But I seek here to explain not myself, but that anger which is evident in my writing at times, when I see things in society or politics which push my buttons.
Most of this anger comes my frustration from spending the last forty years defending myself and other gay men against homophobic discrimination, denigration and outright violence in this society. Those who are identified with the heterosexual mainstream cannot understand this fully. Just as a white man cannot fully understand the weight of being non-white in a white society. Just as a man cannot fully understand the problems of being a woman in a sexist society. Most heterosexuals, whether white or not, in my experience, simply do not even want to try to understand it what it means to be a homosexual in heterosexual society. The word 'tolerance' is used routinely by even liberal heterosexuals when they talk about their attitudes toward gay men.
A secretive holocaust, a form of intentional cultural cleansing, occurred in the U.S. from 1983 until 1990 under the Federal government of the Republicans, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and Congress. Gay men were shunned during the course of one of the worst modern epidemics. The government condoned the worst scapegoating of gay men. It withheld resources intentionally. It spoke of gay concentration camps for the infected.
Yet, society expects gay men now to deny this ever happened...to forget about it. AIDS in the gay community, due to well-earned compassion fatigue, is 'old' and 'tired'. Few of us with the political consciousness of Gay Liberation of the 1970s have actually survived AIDS. Those who conducted the cultural cleansing, the Reagans, the Bushes and their cohorts, who are now the bulk of the Neo-Con movement, succeeded in crushing Gay Liberation as a political movement. The symbolic assassination of Harvey Milk was a portent of things to come.
We endure being forgotten whenever a Holocaust memorial is erected to memorialize the Nazi victims unless we scream loudly. No Mossad searches out and brings to trial those who tortured and killed the gay men of Germany, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary. The killing of gay men was not mentioned noticeably at Nuremberg. There is no gay country, like Israel. And so, when gay men are stigmatized, beaten, ostracized, experimented upon by therapists and regarded as toxic in homes, in jobs, on streets and in hospitals, as during the AIDS early epidemic, very few heterosexuals cry out.
We are expected to be satisfied with the spectacle of the AIDS Quilt. A fun, arty day out for those who were untouched by the epidemic. A stabbing, recurrent grief for those who lived the epidemic. And we still suffer and die from AIDS. We watch as the fundamentalists and Neo-Cons bemoan AIDS in Africa, while condoning the persecution of gay men in Africa. We know that the millions spent in Africa also serve the purpose of bleaching the blood stains from the hands of those who ignored us.
So, pardon me if I decry the earliest glimpses of fascism, especially when they are ignored by others who should be shouting as loudly as I am, based on history. Pardon me if I think anyone who would deny human equality in civil law by withholding marriage rights for gay men is a heartless bigot. Pardon me if I do not try to excuse my own humanity because I carry a socially inconvenient disease. Pardon me if I seem angry, because, about all this, I am and will be until it stops.
In my daily practice, this anger is a perpetual threshold, over which I try to step to remain open to life and all humanity. No amount of meditation or New Age or religious hocus-pocus or therapy or pharmacology. will erase this anger. This anger is as much a part of my survival as the many medications I must swallow every day. Yet, I have become an expert at living with anger and grief. Amazingly, I can still learn to love and nurture other human beings for their goodness by nurturing the embers of love in my heart. I credit this to my practice, perpetual study and endless attempt to seek the good in the people I meet.
