Gaydar

As a gay man of 61 years, I have a skeptical view of 'family values'. So many of my GLBT brothers and sisters have been ejected, sometimes physically, from their families of origin because of their genetic predisposition for same-sex love, passed to them by those families. Like the females of misogynist cultures, GLBT family members were most often viewed as less-than, disposable.

As a gay man, I learned early in my days of personal discovery that skin color and ethnicity were useless barriers to love, acceptance and affection. Nationalism means little to me. It is a hollow clinging to the same familial chauvinism that rejected me and portrayed me as a perverted aberration.

The fraternity among gay men still plays an important role in my life, even as I have adapted to the new liberalism among heterosexuals in my environment. Learning to see one another past the superficiality of passing as neuter or heterosexual, or gaydar as we call it, develops a perceptive skill often lacking in those who take their acceptability or even superiority for granted.

Wouldn't it be a better world, I often think as a humanist, if all human beings learned to perceive their commonality past superficial poses and identities as we do with gaydar?