Mark Twain was apparently a notorious swearer. Since he didn’t use such language in his writings (wasn’t permitted in his day) we have no real idea what his profanity might have sounded like. But in one of his public appearances he mentioned a lady who had written him and asked him not to swear so much, and his reply was…
“Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even unto prayer.”
Many of you have found that to be very true, and I often resort to it my self, usually for shock, or literary effect, but often to satisfy some simple inner passion. If you follow me on Twitter (@BushmillsVassar) you’ll know this, and you’ll also know what sort of barbaric bastards excite this passion.
But then again, there is also promiscuous profanity, common enough, but growing in favor these days, profane promiscuity.
And somewhere inside that jumble of letters, LGBTQIA, which has almost doubled in length since I was first introduced to it the early 90s, (LGBT), is an essence of their movement that was, from the very beginning, profanely promiscuous. And very, very political.
A dangerous combination.
I want to discuss this seriously because it’s a serious cultural and political subject. Only I’ll leave the moral part up to you. I like far too many fine gay men to condemn them because of this single choice in their lives, and maybe even more since many still keep that secret to themselves, an act of privacy the LGBT movement since 90s has strived to stamp out.
You see my baby brother, now 70, has been with the same man for 50 years. Of a family of four children he is the only to have remained married to the same person, his brothers and sister all having divorced over the years.
It was that baby brother who taught me most about the “gay scene”, for he was booted out of the Navy in 1970, and I attended his tribunal at Great Lakes. Then he was booted from my dad’s house when he came home, and ended up in California. In 1972, en route to Japan for a 3-year Army tour, my wife, baby son and I stopped over in northern Arizona to visit him and meet his new partner, who was a known Arizona artist. Good guy. He told us his story of going to LA to meet friends and how he was steered into the gay cruising scene as the quickest was to make money, meeting some very interesting and famous people there. He described that “scene” and how two severe beatings brought him to this small town of 2000 in the Verde Valley, where he took work at the hospital. Four years later, 1976, we returned, after leaving the Army, to a nearby town to practice law…only not to watch over him, but to watch over my dad, who had been one of America’s first heart-bypass patients in 1976. Dad had suddenly retired at age 52, heart attack, and probably chose that same town, with Mom’s help in all likelihood, out of guilt. At the time, docs had given him 18 months, but he lived 16 years, some of that tale I told in one of my “Famous Common People” stories. (It’s both a dog and a dad story.)
My brother had nothing good to say about the gay cruising scene, as both were just as easy among straights as they were gays. They preferred monogamy anyway.
AIDS came like a hammer in the 80s, striking a mighty blow to that whole “bathhouse” culture. “Rub a Dub Dub, Three Men in a Tub” we called it, a party culture where blood, the principal HIV bullet, was shared indiscriminately among many. But many cruisers refused to give up the lifestyle, even knowing the risks. A kind of teat fit that befit their upbringing. Some were prominent in academics, who in turn were prominent in teaching men like Obama’s generation, all similarly raised and indulged; their schooling, affluence, family status, all so very similar.
(I’ll pick up that theme at a later time in other contexts.)
If you don’t know much about male homosexuality, the “condition” is largely found among affluent families, often single children, or the baby of the brood, which had led child psychologists for many years to infer it was a choice, and not DNA’s fault. Nurture, not Nature. (They were politically forced to change their tune in the 70s-80s.)
But it’s true, for some strange, inexplicable reason poor or working class people (still) don’t seem to produce many gay boys. Only, it has been learned in recent decades that the best way to bury that sort of statistical evidence is to stop funding its accumulation, which is a political act, not a scientific one. (We’re seeing the same sort of activity with Covid data today being used to shore up a political agenda.)
It was in the 90s that Gay Rights turned very political, just as I relocated to Cincinnati in 1989. It was the best possible place to observe, for I was in their legal community. It was very Roman Catholic on both sides of the Ohio River, and rock-ribbed culturally conservative. Mark Twain would have said it “was virtuous to the point of eccentricity”, and being both Catholic and southern, everyone minded everyone else’s business with whispers. Twain also said that if God had announced He’d end the world in 7 days, he wanted to be in Cincinnati since it would be 10 more days before they’d hear the news.
Cincinnati had its gay community with a few lounges that catered to cruisers, but the far larger community was in the closet, and for very sensible social and professional reasons, much like small towns. There were no Greenwich Village’s or Haight-Ashbury’s, where gays could live reasonably close. Gays in Cincinnati had to be more circumspect. I had a gay neighbor, a CPA, on the Kentucky side, who asked for some legal advice from time to time. He’d had a couple of different guys who stayed over for a few days. But I also saw him with bruises from where a guy he’d picked up in a bar had rolled him…under the general assumption being, at least in Cincinnati, unlike Jersey, that the victim would never report the assault. Just call it an “occupational risk”. He never reported them.
The HIV vaccines in the 90s sort of signaled an “all clear” to the old “Rub a Dub Dub” lifestyles from the 70s, along with the rising political tide of Gay Rights Movement. Still, because of professional and corporate social standing most gays preferred to stay in the closet. So, “outing” became big sport, and quite mean. LGBT activists believed, since they “spoke for all gays”, they had a right to “tax” them for contributions. But in order to tax them, gays first had to come out in the open and proclaim themselves.
Then, I was sort of out of the loop, 1992-2008 in the Russias where I was given insights into how that part of the world reacted to gays.
Like modern political movements the Gay Movement has grown corporately and politically by taking or inventing new “isms” to incorporate under its umbrella, defined today by the LGBTQQIP2SAA, “which stands for: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, two spirit, asexual, and ally.”
And it has done so by extraordinary advertising, mostly exhibitionism, which now includes trannies reading stories to pre-schoolers in full drag.
But the greatest profanity has been done to the majority of gay men, like my brother, now in his 50th year of marriage, who kept all the public displays behind closed doors, and quite frankly, simply outgrew the carnal urges. In Cincinnati he would not have been allowed.
I recall taking a lady friend from Kentucky, with her young son, to Cincinnati’s River Park, right next to Riverfront Stadium. As soon as we strolled into the park we ran into a huge banner which said “Gay Appreciation Day”. Spying it, I immediately said “Oops” and stopped and turned, thinking this is no place for a Baptist mother and her son.
But too late, for headed straight toward us were two men, a small red-headed fellow in jeans and a burly, hairy-chested fellow wearing the most darling pink pinafore you ever saw, his hairy chest the real eye-catcher. And the redhead was wearing a t-shirt of an oyster, probably from one of the Celebration’s sponsors, which read “Shuck me, suck me” with the name of the patron oyster bar. I turned around and tried to steer my lady friend away, but she snatched her arm away and raced straight into that pink pinafore, arms flailing like windmills, shrieking “How dare you to my my little boy!”. A tiny thing, not much bigger than her son, I had to grab her, kicking and screaming under my arm, like you’d carry a potato sack. I tried to give the guys a civil apology but was repaid with sneers which almost made me want to drop her and let them taste their own snot.
Kicker: In Kentucky she lived next door to two gay men, who she’d often let that same son visit and would sometimes sit in the back yard with, smoking and sharing gossip.
What was the difference?
Profane promiscuity…where Nature has its own rules of selection about survival.
About lesbians, I discussed them in one my Common People essays, “Gays in the Military” how I generally feel about lesbians. In the military the rock fell hardest on the aggressive gays, the “butches”, but they were also were among the finest soldiers in the truest sense of the term.
Having lived and worked in Asia, Russia, and well-acquainted with Middle Eastern cultures, in terms of the things we hold high in relationships, especially romance, most men are clueless. My prostitute friends at Manos’ in Tokyo told me that Japanese businessmen were rutting pigs. At $100 a trick, they said they were earning almost a thousand-an-hour, the rumpy-pumpy part taking more than 3 minutes. No pretty words, no caresses. No romance. Just grunting.
These hookers felt sorry for Japanese wives who never heard a single sweet-nothing in years of marriage. But worse off were the cloistered, house-locked Arab women who found their only companionship in their female friends, and that romance, sweet words, was more important than carnal sex.
Lesbians have their “cruisers” too. Sgt Marty was one, but in interviewing her pickups, I got the impression she also was sweet and romantic.
20th Century America, with the assistance of Jane Austen, Hollywood, RCA Victor, Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers, was able to sculpture a “culture of romance” that could be exported worldwide.
As for Trannies, of course, LGB expanded to include the T (for Trans) which I’d always had a soft spot for in Asia, because all they ever wanted was to be able to show off. I did a piece in 2019 about the “Not-a-Sheila’s” I’d run into around the world. I’ve always found them friendly and interesting, and not the least bit political, or prone to teat-fittery. The same in America, and rarely homosexual.
Every ugly thing I feel today about Antifa and BLM I feel about the outrageous demands of the profane, promiscuous gay community. Just stop it at LGB (the Q is a redundancy). The rest is just part of their Branding Outreach Program, looking for dollars and political power. Deny them that, and they will resort to the same infantile behavior of the “children of the damned” who have denuded much of the western civilization the past quarter century.
Ours is the only nation in the world that had developed a “live and let live” social solution as to how the 95% of natural society treats the other 5%. It was much like scientist-atheists in the 1920s-30s, who learned early on, that Christian America provided them the safest environment to pursue and publish pure Science. Post-modernism killed that.
What the modern gay coalition do not understand is the Natural Law of Useful Idiots, namely that once they have helped their manipulators to achieve the kind of power they seek, they will then simply jettison them, just as all other autocrats have. And always will.
That’s a law.
Visual Promiscuity is profane and survival-endangering. So decrees Nature. Not politics.
