Little Children Burn

Matt here.

Sometimes I think we, gay people, are like little little children. We get our fingers pinched or go in for our shots and scream like we've been set on fire.

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From time to time I hear an argument, usually in the comments sections of articles but occasionally from dear dear friends, that God would not let people be born gay and then expect them to live celibate lives. I understand the appeal of the argument, of course; if God wouldn't command us to be celibate, then we're good to go on the sex thing. Hallelujah!

The problem is that this argument isn't actually an argument—it's just a denial. It's sticking your head in the sand, thinking that if you can't see the consequences, they can't bite you in the butt.

In fact, it's worse than a flat denial. If you say "Gay sex is a sin" and I say "No it isn't," we can argue all day about who has the authority to declare what's sinful and what's not. But if you say "Gay sex is a sin" and I say "God wouldn't let me be born gay if gay sex were a sin," the argument now becomes about what God would not allow, and that list appears to be remarkably short.

Assuming God exists, he either causes or allows an amazing range of horrific events. I flatter myself I needn't list them, though I'm thinking of one particular thing. I was in Hiroshima last week, at the Atomic Bomb Museum, where I was perfectly fine until I saw a mannequin wearing a torn, burned boy's junior high school uniform and I involuntarily pictured my favorite student's face. I was not fine after that.

God lets little children burn to death. Every awful thing that has ever happened, God let it happen. How presumptuous, to say that because God allows a thing it's not a tragedy, and the consequences can't hurt. How ridiculous, for grown men and women to caterwaul that the pain the church asks them to suffer is more than God would ask.

Bitch, please.

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Tonight is my last night in Japan. By the time you read this, I should be back in good ole California.

Dear Suicidal Self

Hello. You seem to be having a fairly quiet day today, which is good news for me. Tuesday, however, was a different story. We went to the therapy and you cried for a while bout how much you wish you could just go away. You didn't want to be here anymore, but you finally admitted that you were too scared of an afterlife to try to kill yourselves. What would be the point, after all, if you just kept on living after death?

Then you got talking about an afterlife in which we could be happy. Your picture was of our aunt and uncle's old beach trailer in San Clemente, on a pebbly, rocky, misty beach. We could live there in harmony with a dog and with rooms and rooms and rooms of books. If the afterlife could be a long stretch of misty beach with fresh fish on the pier, a good black dog in a cozy house, and all the time in the world to read all the books we will never had time to read, we'd be content.

Aaron Freeman wrote a beautiful sketch for NPR a few years ago that begins, "You want a physicist to speak at your funeral." He says,

"And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy's still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you're just less orderly. Amen."

We both find that comforting.

Still, the other part of me, the one who wants to live and experience and grow, wants to remind you on those terrible days that there are things in life that you and I both love. Here are some pictures to illustrate:

First of all, my wonderful dog,

And my Very Photogenic Boyfriend. I also love my wonderful friends, and would add photogenic pictures of them as well, but I'd be afraid of embarrassing them.

I love the seasons and the mountains and the trees.

There are those times when I'm so ridiculously happy to be alive, like at the 7th Harry Potter book release with these ridiculous glow-in-the-dark Harry Potter-esque glasses.


















And, of course, somewhere in California, San Clemente and its pebbly rocky beach and its long misty pier and its fresh fish and its warm cafes really does exist. Which is a comfort in itself.

Anyway, try to remember these things on those bleak days when you want your life to be over. It's hard. It's bad. And it's not going to just go away. You're going to cry, and you're going to hate yourself, and you're going to hate your life. But hold on, and remember that good things exist, and that people love you, and that you love them too.

Playing with my boyfriend's best friend's adorable baby girl for an hour today didn't hurt either.

And, of course, remember how beautiful poetry is, and what a comfort that can be in hard times.

Much love to everyone, and good luck to you all this coming week!

Carry

I want to carry you
and for you to carry me
the way voices are said to carry over water.

Just this morning on the shore,
I could hear two people talking quietly
in a rowboat on the far side of the lake.

They were talking about fishing,
then one changed the subject,
and, I swear, they began talking about you.

-Billy Collins


Oh, and ps, happy bisexuality day! Celebrate!!

Horror Movies

Since Halloween is my favorite holiday, my boyfriend and I have been kicking off the October season early by watching horror movies. For instance, this weekend we watched this one:

which was absolutely and completely terrifying, in spite of the eventual triumph of this lovely leading lady:

played by Jessica Harper. We also watched Interview With the Vampire tonight, and I've never wanted Antonio Banderas to make out with Brad Pitt so badly:

or at least for their fabulous hair to become romantically involved in some way. 

Anyway, what I've been thinking about tonight is the fact that we have an entire holiday that forces us to think about death. I guess in American culture it isn't really about death anymore--it's about kids dressing up in cute costumes and parading around suburban streets to collect candy. Alternatively, it's about me watching scary movies and throwing a Halloween party featuring pumpkin carving, baked pumpkin seeds, caramel popcorn, and dinner inside a pumpkin. Spooky Halloween decorations placed strategically around my apartment are fun too.

But--and correct me if I'm wrong--it seems like Halloween at its heart is a reflection on death and dying, even if our culture tries to ignore that, like it does every other facet of aging and dying. It makes the familiar unfamiliar by dressing us up in masks and sending us to scavenge the dark neighborhood under streetlights. We hang up cutesy little ghosts that bobble from trees and windows, completely divorcing them from the idea that they represent dead souls.

I guess I was thinking about this in part because I've been watching so many vampire movies. Vampire mythology inverts the Christian mythos by substituting unholy vampire blood for the blood of Christ, which then acts to resurrect vampires to immortality. Interview With the Vampire wants us to believe that the tradeoff isn't worth it--instead, we're supposed to die at a given time to make way for other souls, so that we're not constantly feeding off each other. But death is a terrifying prospect for most of us, which makes it hard to fault vampiric characters who choose an unholy immortality over death.

What's interesting about Halloween, though, is that in some ways it becomes a celebration of death. Autumn represents the temporary death of some parts of nature, but it's a beautiful season (and, if you couldn't tell, it's obviously my favorite season). I know that it's been hard for some friends of mine who have lost their faith in a monotheistic god to deal with the fact of death without the cushion of faith in an afterlife with an eternal family. Speaking for myself, I don't find the idea of an afterlife comforting; it indicates that life goes on in some eternal toil, when what I want out of death is rest and release. But still, death is big, and terrifying, and painful, and frightening, regardless of whether or not you have a religious cushion.

But the point of the matter is, no one knows what happens after death. Different religions take different perspectives, and I like the Islamic idea that the afterlife is like an oasis in a desert. But what we do know is that everyone dies. Which is part of why we need a Halloween--a carnivalesque turning of life on its head to remind us that death is a natural part of life, including within the natural world itself, that the eerie can be lovely, and that as humans, we share a collective fascination with and terror of death, which in itself makes death less awful and all-consuming and disastrous.

I hope this post isn't offensive or harmful to anyone; speaking as a suicidal person, death can be a tricky thing for me to talk about. But Halloween is one of those rare times that makes me feel gleeful about being alive. And so does this poem by Robert Hass, a former poet laureate, which, in my opinion, is about the joys of life, of human sexuality, of beauty in the natural world and our connection to it, and about our inability to comprehend the enormity and beauty of the entire wonderful universe.

Have a good week, everyone!

Etymology

Her body by the fire
Mimicked the light-conferring midnights
Of philosophy.
Suppose they are dead now.
Isn't "dead now" an odd expression?
The sound of the owls outside
And the wind soughing in the trees
Catches in their ears, is sent out
In scouting parties of sensation down their spines.
If you say it became language or it was nothing,
Who touched whom?
In what hurtle of starlight?
Poor language, poor theory
Of language. The shards of skull
In the Egyptian museum looked like maps of the wind-eroded
Canyon labyrinths from which,
Standing on the verge
In the yellow of a dwindling fall, you hear
Echo and re-echo the cries of terns
Fishing the worked silver of a rapids.
And what to say of her wetness? The Anglo-Saxons
Had a name for it. They called it silm.
They were navigators. It was also
Their word for the look of moonlight on the sea.