Ronny

hey, chimp-loving actor man

are you resting in peace alone?

no crowds there in the ground.
cameras are all turned off now.

remember me? could you now?

your big feet walked all over us.

that hollywood '40s wave smile

under your red-dyed white hair.

are you mingling with my pals?

killed by your anti-gay bigotry
killing the chance to kill a virus,

killing us sooner, you had hoped.

what do you say to quilt people?

do you charm them with a joke?

do you blame the darn russians?

do you cry "mommy'' to nancy?

your own gay son is born again.

jesus-loving son of rightist god.

the fanatics mass to your image,

print it on the fifty, they chant.

you are their addled golden calf,

elevated as the neo-cons' idol

in the face of any human justice,

false liberty's proud demagogue.

Webness

I received a comment (unposted) from a reader today, whose email signature included a link to a Web site. The Web site is a so-called female escort agency. I was blasted with graphic pictures of gigantic naked breasts and bleached smiles. Now, while cyber-pimps and pornographers are often seen as sketchy folk, I appreciated this person's comment. I did wonder why this person was drawn to my rather quiet blog on ethics, politics and practical philosophy. I also wondered if the comment was made by a real person.

I chose to meditate on this during my afternoon walk. I recalled seeing an ad recently for housewives who wanted to make cash working from home. I then researched these schemes and found that these suburban housewives are posting links to pornography sites and offshore casinos through various search-engine advertising programs. Then I wondered how many of these stalwart suburbanites signed petitions against gay marriage or attended yowling Tea Party meetings about family values and getting government out of their health care.

More communication, more information, its all here on the Web. But, what is it achieving? Is it educating? I know it is entertaining at a profit if suburban moms can cash in on porn and gambling. Does that add value to our lives in general? Or does it just make us all a little less accountable, less responsible, less ethical or just plain less caring?

I look across the national landscape as reported in a variety of media. I don't see knowledge, awareness and improved quality in our country. I see terror-phobia, ignorance of how the health care system works, nationalist ego without basis, and a determined, evil movement by some on the Far Right (neo-cons) to undermine the average person to the advantage of the already super-rich.

What can be done about this? There is no Big Answer. We are evolving, and our technology with us. Perhaps one day China, as it takes over the world, will paternalistically guide us back to a more moderate path. Perhaps a Haiti-like apocalypse will wipe the slate clean. Perhaps the U.S. will continue on its Balkanizing descent and become a larger version of Mexico or Colombia. It is obvious to me that technology will not save any of us.

So, while I try to keep abreast of advances in communication and technology, I am very conscious that my touchstone is my daily personal practice. I strive to practice in the virtual world as I do in the real world. That is the best I can do.

Anger

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.