Thought, Provoked

This afternoon I was texting with a friend that Mina and I had been doing henna art on the night before. Our conversation eventually lapsed into distraction. In summary, she had recently converted religion, and as a consequence was having to give up her lust for women.

Of course, this strikes right into the very heart of my nature, and, I’m embarrassed to admit I almost immediately felt the need to challenge this. I know better than that, of course, and it’s really rude to take someone’s freshly minted religion and start scribbling on it with your own Sharpie. So, some apologies were warranted.

But, it also threw me into another world of thought, as I flashed back to when I was trying to cope with my own sexuality in a sex-free marriage. I was captive to a religious system that boxed sex away as “original sin.” It was for procreation only, and the fact that it resulted in orgasm was deeply complicated. Lust, of course, IS one of the seven deadly sins. Though I spent years denying it, fighting it, trying to expunge it from my spirit so I could be happy in my marriage. My marriage, of course, was a holy institution, and one i was committed to for life. I could also see how my lust was hurting my wife, when I would be feeling cranky from frustration, or downright hostile. At the same time, I was never comfortable with the turn a lot of people in my church had towards people who were gay. I will never forget my uncle telling me the Bible says we should stone the gay people because they worship a different god, or my cousins telling my sister she couldn’t “do” her black boyfriend at the time. None of that really suited my more tolerant nature.

I eventually realized that lust would never go away. So, once I accepted that the lust was an immutable part of who am I, just as gayness was unchangeable part of others, I had other questions to confront. Why did God make me want sex? Why put this thing in me that is unholy? Why make gay people?

When you stare into the abyss of realizing that Heaven has no place for you, you start facing other possibilities. Is God cruel, if He exists at all? There came a separate thought process that challenged God’s existence in my head (I officially describe myself as agnostic) but there was another distillation to be had as I started seeing the reactions of people as my divorce became public. I discovered how many people’s reactions were really reflections of their own relationships, and I began peeling back the shiny veneers of the relationships around me. There are so many people out there who are so miserable trying to fit in a role that defined for them. It’s sad, for me, to see people repressing themselves, or parts of themselves, because I always see the seeds of sadness being planted.

The psychological wringer that is the sexual closet is one of those inevitable, unstoppable machines you always wish you could pull someone out of, because you know, personally the hell they are careening into. I could see the joy people who finally leave the closet had, and I remember personally all the time I spent untying the knots I put in my own head. But what makes me angry, angry, was the realization that I had done all this self-flagellation against the person God made me to conform to the rules Man had written from very dark places in his own psyche. It was the same set of laws that had my uncle stoning gay people, and my cousins hiding from interracial desires.

I harbor a very deep seated skepticism of any rules regulating sexual behavior. I think, as I look at many rules putting strictures on people’s sexual behavior, it comes from protecting the discomfort of most uptight around us. What pains me is the idea that in this short, short slice of existence we are given in the sweep of eternity, that we are supposed to deny ourselves the true connections we can feel, that are as much a part of our spirit as our bones and muscles, that hurt no one, but warm everyone they touch, because someone a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, was uncomfortable with the idea that any sperm might go to waste, that any woman might not need a man, or that the world might proceed in a way that was not in his control.

My life is too short to yield to someone else’s thoughtless taboo any more.

But that’s my philosophy. Not yours. And, every once in a while, it’s good to open up that old chest in your mental attic, blow the dust off and see if it still makes sense. While I still like it for me, it’s MY philosophy, and mine only.