The Art of a Life Well Lived.

I was reading yesterday that 30% of gay youth attempt suicide and they estimate that self harm without the intention of killing oneself may be as high as 48%, but it’s hard to tell as not many people admit to it. I was reading this in DNA October 2010 issue and they had another article on the gay rights movement which turns 40 this year, and how gay history is not passed on as well an straight history as most gays have no children to pass on their life experiences to. Reading about all the struggle people went through to change the laws to what they are today, and to some extent people’s attitude, got me in an atavistic frame of mind. The work that went into these pieces of writing was amazing and I totally commend the editorial stands of DNA, that magazine just keeps getting better, and the level of intelligence that goes into each issue, in-between the glossy photos, is probably rarely matched.

After 40 yes of struggle, what was it that people were fighting for? Liberty? Yes liberty! I think the best way to put it is THE RIGHT TO FUCK. And the right to choose how to live one’s life when it doesn’t affect other people. Which led me to my next thought, why would there be so much resistance to fucking anyway?
It’s a beautiful thing, and to most men life at it’s fullest. I think most men would put sex above drugs, and probably love, food or alcohol and probably even money and power. I don’t think if a genie said to me “I will give you money and status in return for never having sex again”, that I would agree.

I know a lot of problems come from fucking
1. Disease and even death
2. Unwanted children, and the expense of caring for them
3. Death through child birth and health complications from child birth
4. Emotional pain and all the entanglement that come with a broken heart
I know that birth control, education for everyone and condoms are all fairly recent occurrences, and that gay men, druggies and prostitutes where the minorities that got caught in the cross fire from the HIV hysteria, before we knew how it was spread and how to keep our selves safe. But given that another 20 years has passed since condoms became the norm for sex with strangers, and most people can plan children, and education for all has meant that the majority of the population can enter into consenting recreational sexual encounters that do not lead to abuse and use, why is there still a lingering air of sexual oppression from right wing religious groups.
Firstly I would like to say, thank you for being concerned enough about us to want to save our souls, and keep us safe from harmful practices. But I’m not really convinced that same sex attraction is caused by the devil, I don’t think it is a perversion of nature. If you take away the sick feeling that some people get when they think of two men having sex, and realize that, that is only a form of prudishness and a lack of sexual openness. That feeling of yuck in the pit of your stomach is not God telling you what is right and wrong, it’s your own fear of things you haven’t tried or think you would like. I used to have the same feeling about sex acts I thought I would hate, but then grew to love.

I also know that in Victorian times it was the responsibility of the church parish to care for any bastard children that were born. If the Father of the child was not married to the woman, he had no legal responsibility to care for the child, and if the mother or mothers family couldn’t, then they would drop the baby off at the church orphanage and the cost of raising the child fell on the parish. It’s easy to see how this would lead to intense sermons from the pulpit about the evils of sex outside of marriage. Especially when education levels were so low, women had no chance to earn their own money and their reputation and eligibility to marry where their only way of being looked after, after the death of their parents. Before the 1930’s the term Homosexual didn’t exist. Sex with a man was seen as an unholy act in the same way sex with a woman one was not married to was, it was all called buggery. Heterosexual actually mean “sex for pleasure” not sex between male and female, as we now use it.

Johnny Howard once said that he does not support the Mardi Gras because gay life style is selfish in its nature, because no children can come from it, and there for it is anti family and anti life. Well Mr Howard, 6 billion people are on the planet and we are on the way to 9 billion by 2040. This is a major problem, we hear about the ageing population in Australia, but the reality is the world is over crowding so quickly it’s scary. For the whole globe to live as well as Australians, Americans and Europeans do, we would need 6 planets, it is totally unsustainable. So Western living standards will drop to as globalization spreads wealth more evenly across the globe. If the third world was encouraged to be gay, a major problem for the world could be fixed. This out dated view that having children is the meaning of life, has to be stopped. Children are wonderful. But too many without the resources to care for them is the ultimate form of child abuse. The notion that all life is valuable and wonderful and should be encouraged is dangerous. The message of only responsible people with the means to care for children should have them, needs to be pushed much harder. In India the average birth rate is 6 children per woman, and this due to their lack of education for women and that women have no power to say no to their husbands. They must have as many children as the Mother in Law and husband says she must have, and 2 sons is a minimum, so they keep having children until 2 boys have been born.

To bring this back to gay Sydney, religious groups are using old out dated views on the world as the reasons to condemn homosexual love and life style. Evil is Live spelt backwards, and when trying to think weather ones actions are good or bad, using this simple question, “Does it improve life or make life worse?” Is my way of deciding. To try and deny someone their natural feelings because it doesn’t fit their view of the world, seem much more life killing, than the argument that everyone who isn’t married shouldn’t have sex and everyone who is must have children.

I think until churches realize that the old rules that used to make sense to keep people happy and healthy, don’t apply to modern people who can make decisions for themselves, that they are happy with, and that imposing old restrictive beliefs is actually evil, as it kills life, this struggle between Gay people and conservative churches will continue.

I realize there are still vulnerable people out there, intellectually disabled people for an example, who would best be served by the ideals of chastity and monogamy, the promiscuous life style is not for everyone, and if true love comes knocking why deny it. But for most gay men that is not the story of their life, sexual exploration is. And a lot of good comes from it. Not just heart ache and disease. The example I use is, you can be a slut and find true love and know you have found it. Or you can wait till you find “the one” and find out they don’t meet all you needs as you thought they would and wonder if the grass is really greener on the other side, while trapped in a marriage.
I think that the issue of how to live one’s life is the most debatable topic of today. We are witnessing social change in front of our very eyes, and I think that there has perhaps been no greater shift in the way western society lives and sees itself. The concept that sex should only occur between a man and a woman in marriage is defiantly not something that most people live any more, but maybe an ideal that most still aim for, even gay men, that is gay monogamy / marriage. If religious groups are the last bastion of this ideal, along with people with conservative views, if they gradually relax their opinion into something more main stream, are there really any sexual boundaries left to be expanded?
There is one sexual frontier that I can think of. Well two really. First is the idea that we are either straight or gay and should stick to one side. If there was a lot less social conditioning and social pressure that straight is the norm and you only go gay if you can’t stand to be straight. And sex was taught as an act of fun that should be enjoyed with whom ever and whenever we feel like, then I think the world would be a lot more “Pan sexual” or “Try sexual”, I hate the word Bi sexual as it implies that by having sex with both sexes you are a different sexual class all together.
Of course for women to want to join the orgy as much as men do they would have to get to a point where they were sexual and emotionally mature enough to want to do it, free from fear about reputations, pregnancy and disease.
And the final thing on my wish list for the future is; disease is totally not a factor anymore and we can all have sex freely with out condoms, we could stick our dick in whomever we wanted without having to worry about being careful, just spray it where ever we want……. That would be nice.