A short addendum to my posting earlier today about the seemingly voracious appetite of some of my fellow Catholics (and fellow Christians and fellow citizens) to imagine what I do in my bedroom: Steve and I have a friend who is one of three sisters. Our friend and one sister are whatever the opposite of homophobic is. They have a wide range of gay and lesbian friends, artist friends, black friends (these are white women), Latino and Latina friends: you name it. Their circle of friends is Kooks R Us, everyone welcome. And I'll be writing down the road about a story one of these two women has just shared with me about her niece.
The sister who has problems with the gays has discovered--shock! how does this happen? what kind of God permits such outrages?--that her closest high-school friends were all gay. All boys who have come out of the closet as adults.
And this bothers her. Why did she attract to herself the same kind of kooks r us that her gay-friendly sisters attract, when she's an upright Episcopalian who works at her Episcopal church in a Southern city not known for its conspicuous gay-friendliness or its liberal-inclusive Episcopal churches (this is not Little Rock, which has many gay-friendly Episcopalians). Why me?
The sister tells her other two sisters she just can't get beyond what she imagines her former high-school friends do in their bedrooms, in their gay bedrooms. To which the two kooks r us sisters reply, "Well, do you sit around imagining what your straight friends do in their bedrooms? Do you try to imagine what our parents used to do in their bedroom?"
Prospects that horrify Ms. Upright Episcopalian, who has to admit that, well, her sisters have a point. And that it might, indeed, be a tad strange to feel compelled to spin imaginings about what anyone else does in the privacy of his/her bedroom.
And so this story: I have to confess to being more than a little amused at the attempt of the sodomites/anal sex/gays as sex toys crowd to imagine what goes on in my bedroom. And at their flattering attempt to attribute to me a sex-saturated life that bears no resemblance to the life I lead as an old, flabby, tired man who has spent 41 years with another old, flabby, tired man who loves me dearly and whom I love dearly.
Sex toys? Which of us has the energy even to pick one up when we retire to our bedroom each night--let alone turn each flabby, tired, old other into a sex toy? Here's what really goes on in my flamboyantly gay bedroom these days:
The weather is now turning cool here. I'm a lazy git, and usually linger in bed of a morning after Steve gets up.
By the time I get up, he will have 1) lit the small gas space heater in the cold little bathroom adjacent to our bedroom, so it will be warm for me when I get up, and 2) thoughtfully fetched my house shoes (slippers to most readers, house shoes for us in the South) and put them beside the space heater, so I can slip my cold feet into them as I walk out of the bedroom.
That's our sex-toy life that incorporates no love, commitment, or kindness towards anyone, in the imaginations of God's ordained Catholic messengers about "the" gay "lifestyle." Since who has time for piffles like love, commitment, or kindness when his life is about nothing but making his beloved into a sex toy?
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