Liberation

One way of achieving enlightenment in ancient prescriptions is striving for emptiness. Emptiness implies letting go of ego and a cluttered mind. Meditation is a traditional method for practicing emptiness of mind and liberation from suffering.

While I understand these concepts, I feel the ancient concepts of enlightenment and liberation are relevant in a very different way in modern society. As we become liberated from religion through science, our minds can open to many other ways to achieve liberation from suffering. For example, some would see pharmaceutical technology as a substitute for meditation or psychoanalysis in the pursuit of personal insight and evolution.

The problem with technological substitutes or alternatives for meditation and reflection is simple. Most of us cannot develop our own technological substitutes for these activities. In other words, liberation in a full sense is impossible, since we depend on a factory to make the pills which may take the place of practice. Capitalism fosters this dependence on product as a substitute for practice.

The beauty of practice as an approach to liberation from personal suffering is its empowerment. It requires no dependence on pills, gurus or mentors. By emptying a life of dependence and taking full responsibility for its suffering, a seeker who develops a daily practice of meditation and mindful investigation of being achieves one first step toward liberation.

Post-Gay

A recent Boston public radio program hosted a discussion about Boston as a "post-gay" city. As a native of the Boston area, who has lived here most of my life, I found the discussion revealing and somewhat confirming of suspicions I have had about the political views of those who are currently steering the LGBTQ politics here through media and lobbying.

I do not cling to the past by any means. I do feel that the current political leaders of our local LGBTQ community represent the new (downtown) Boston population of marriage-oriented, conservative and high-income professionals. This is a matter of simple economics. The Menino administration's development policies have purged the city of single, low-to-mid-income, young gay men and lesbians, who once made Boston's gay community one of the most vibrant in the U.S..

Many have moved to Providence, where there is a gay street life and night life, similar to the Boston of the past. Others have moved to Dorchester and have developed a new, active gay community there, which is out of sync with the less-unified downtown community. Boston Proper has become the Gay Marriage Capital, a bastion of more conservative LGBTQ values.

While I take a certain pride in my own small contribution to the development of gay rights in the U.S. through my participation in our liberation during the past four decades, I do not acknowledge the current post-gay LGBTQ's as my successors or heirs. I accept their choice to pursue bourgeois, Reaganite bliss. However, our rights were not secured, nor will they necessarily be maintained, by pushing baby carriages and acting just like heterosexuals.

I am not post-gay. I will die as an openly gay man with self-respect for my intrinsic, natural difference from heterosexuals or bisexuals or transsexuals. I have worked hard for that self-respect and for the rights of all homosexual people to live in peace with equal rights. I feel a certain implicit disrespect towards me and others like me coming from those who have the money and propensity to act straight in a socioeconomically privileged Boston. While they may relegate me to "pre-post-gay" history, I assure them that I and many others like me will be absolutely necessary to maintaining their rights into the future.

Parade

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Pride

June is the annual month of Gay Pride celebrations around the world. The concept of Gay Pride grew from the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Black Pride as a movement preceded Gay Pride. Black Pride was associated in media with Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, leaders of Black Muslims and Black Panthers, respectively. Ironically, the African-American community in the U.S. is still slow in its acceptance of its GLBTQ brothers and sisters.

Gay Pride began as a movement of defiance in the face of widespread homophobia in American society. Coming out as gay was a political act with serious repercussions in the U.S. during the late 1960s and 1970s. It continues to be an act of courage today for many people who do not live in accepting communities. And, in parts of the world, coming out publicly places gay people in peril of their lives at the hands of repressive governments or Sharia Law.

The annual celebrations of Gay Pride in cities around the world now attract millions of GLBTQ people and their supporters. This annual coming out onto the streets in the light of day can be seen as the root of all current political progress on GLBTQ civil rights and universal human rights around the world.

The advent and decimation of the AIDS epidemic seriously threatened the evolution of gay political life in the U.S. and other nations. However, Gay Pride can be considered a major element in the sense of community which fostered profound grassroots support for victims of the AIDS epidemic, when governments were slow to respond. The mobilization of ACT UP in the U.S. was inspired by gay men, like Larry Kramer in New York, who were involved in the early Gay Pride movement. The NAMES Project, which developed the AIDS Memorial Quilt, was cofounded by Cleve Jones, protege of assassinated gay activist Harvey Milk.

The survival and further development of gay communities through the AIDS epidemic has given current Gay Pride celebrations an aspect of gravitas along with traditional partying, which is emblematic of urban gay life. It's not just a festival. It is a way of making sure GLBTQ people are still alive and participating as an visible segment of the world community.

Jihadists

If you wish to see the underbelly of anachronistic Muslim patriarchy, watch PBS-Frontline's Dancing Boys of Afghanistan on line.

In a world obsessed with pedophile and pederast Catholic priests, it is interesting to see the roots of the problem magnified in Afghan society, which is living centuries behind ours in economic and cultural development. Examining the victimization of poor boys and girls which exists in Afghanistan is time travel. These abuses were omnipresent in the West through the 19th century. Poverty with high birth rates provides the playing fields for abusers, usually adult males, heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual.

The repression of sexual feelings, encouraged by religion, messes up human beings. This is no news flash or fringe speculation. Freud spent much of his career trying to figure out how to fix the problem. Subsequently, the Women's Movement and Gay Liberation offered a solution to millions. Now, in these reactionary, post-HIV times, exploited by the Reaganites, Thatcherites and their ilk, we begin to fight the battle for liberation all over again, globally and at great cost.

Appreciation

An open letter of appreciation:

Herr Ratzinger,

Danke. I wanted to convey my heartfelt appreciation to you. Your expressions of homophobic venom and actions of covert enabling of sexual exploitation of minors by your religious brethren has helped my gay/lesbian brothers and sisters, present and future, a great deal.

By banning gay men from the priesthood, you have spared them from a tortured life of self-hatred and schizoid behavior. By banning women from the priesthood, you have encouraged Catholic lesbians, who feel religiously motivated, to look elsewhere. By horrifying the most reactionary Catholics with your hypocrisy, you have dealt a potential death blow to an institution which would darken and pollute the lives of families with gay/lesbian children into the future.

And, if you yourself might have some sexual secrets of your own to share or confess, I would encourage you to get them off your conscience now. It could not be a better time. You could not do much more harm to your institution. And, you will feel much better.

Yours in the light of day,

Paul Creeden

Acceptance

The first step to true liberation is acceptance.

It's easier said than done. As mammals with frontal lobes, our considerable evolution has been fueled by individual and group pursuit of The Great Why and The Great How.

Yet, to liberate ourselves, it is crucial to accept The Great Is. I mean to say it is necessary to deeply accept the realities of our own individual human life in this Universe. It is ancient wisdom: I am born; I grow older each moment; I die. This is the Great Commonality which binds us to each other and all life on our planet.

True, internalized acceptance of The Great Commonality erases fear, prejudice, selfishness, hatred, violence, indolence. It removes huge barriers from the useful, creative and shared pursuit of The Great Why and The Great How.

Meditation on hardship. Experience of pain and aging. Inspiring health and joy in others. Focusing on and attending to the immediate needs next to you and gradually more and more beyond your own life. These are some of the ways acceptance of The Great Commonality heals us and could heal our species and our planet. Unfortunately, acceptance of The Great Commonality comes for most human beings in old age and far too close to death for its effects to ripple through the species.

Dithering over the afterlife and things we cannot or do not attempt to plainly, scientifically prove in The Great Is wastes time and human energy. It is the procrastination of the self-centered and those who manipulate and enslave through ritual and religion. Liberated practice is putting acceptance into action from a place of mindful, peaceful and loving compassion.

Uganda

As the Ugandan parliament wavers on passing a law to allow for the death penalty for gay men in that country and Uganda's executive still supports the 14-year jail sentence for being gay in Uganda, the Ugandans rejoice over the potential of massive oil revenues from the western part of that benighted country.

Ah, oil! Now it becomes glaringly obvious why no louder pressure is being put on Uganda by other governments, including the U.S. government, to avert the potential massacre of homosexuals in Uganda. It seems the new Africa-obsession includes good old homophobia and scapegoating, as long as those natural resources keep coming under the auspices of corrupted governments, propped up by international corporations.

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.