THERE ARE NO GAY MUSLIMS.

Despite the attempts of corporate media outlets to drag out "gay Muslims" following the massacre of LGBT people in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016 in an apparent attempt to absolve Muslims from responsibility for supporting a lethal xenophobic ideology, I assert my argument that there are no gay Muslims. They are fictional beings, like demons and unicorns. 

I do not deny that some sexually active human beings consider themselves gay, even though they are not. These individuals may or may not even be homosexual. Many come from gender-segregated cultures, which appear homosexual in nature, but are actually simply steeped in deep misogyny and sexual repression. The shooter in Orlando has been labelled "gay" in some media stories, but no truly gay man would have performed his atrocity on other LGBT people. Having homosexual feelings does not make you gay. 

Being gay implies a degree of self-development and identity formation that purges the homosexual mind of the poison of religious indoctrination and/or cultural repression of sexual enjoyment for its own sake. 

How did I come up with this concept? Well, I was born into an indoctrinating identity-polluting religion, Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholics of my childhood (1950's) brainwashed children into believing that moral sexuality is exclusively heterosexual in the context of a breeding marriage between a man and a woman. Children of my generation were also brainwashed into believing we were physically branded by baptism for life and into an imagined afterlife. In other words, our entire beings were said to be intrinsically and irreversibly Roman Catholic. The parallels to Nazi indoctrination concerning Arianism are obvious. 

Today, young people repeatedly refer to themselves as Muslim in the same way we were indoctrinated to refer to ourselves as Roman Catholic. Unlike being Jewish, which is indeed an intentional racial identity outside the ideology of religious Judaism, Muslims bear no distinct racial identity outside the religion's ideology. In other words, nobody is born a Muslim. One is indoctrinated into identifying as one from infancy to the point that the religion merges with the physical identity in the brainwashed mind.

My childhood Roman Catholic mind control was a cancer, a mental disease intentionally imposed on my naturally homosexual being by adults. At the time in The West, the public perception was that my natural homosexuality was a disease to be eliminated by indoctrination, even electroshock or imprisonment.  Psychology and psychiatry were still relatively undeveloped in this area. However, there is no excuse in today's Information Age for a literate homosexual adult to remain ignorantly indoctrinated. Voluntary indoctrination, childish dependence upon familial or cultural origins and self-imprisonment by ideology are all voluntary adult choices, not states of victimhood.  

The Roman Catholic cancer of my childhood tortured me throughout my adolescence. I was diseased, not by my natural and exhilarating attraction to other boys, but by the poison which had been forced into my mind by priests, nuns, parents and relations. I grew to detest my perfectly normal body. I became introverted and isolated. I became suicidal after the accidental deaths of two male peers toward whom I had strong attractions. In college, I drank excessively under the weight of my self-induced pain and ignorant loneliness.

That changed in 1970. That year I began to become a gay man, not a self-loathing homosexual. I met a gay man who had emerged from his own identity cocoon. He was a marvelous butterfly. I fell in love with him on sight. He was patient and compassionate. Over the next five years, he helped me discover my true self within our relationship. Perhaps he saved my life. 

I became active within the Gay Liberation movement. Rather than bemoaning my Catholic parents' violent and total rejection of me because of my homosexuality, I got to work on my own life. I grew up. I started with no money and a relatively impractical education. By opening myself to other liberated men, I was able to get the psychological and educational support I needed to become a productive and contributing member of society.

I became a registered nurse by salvaging what I could from a formal education I had chosen to please my Catholic parents. I insisted on being an openly gay nursing student, one of very few in the U.S. at the time. I was challenged by homophobic teachers, patients and peers, but I persevered. I did it for myself and for those homosexual people who would follow me. I write this now for frightened homosexual people, some who think they are irreversibly Catholic or Mormon or Muslim. I continued to be vocally gay in job interviews. I was denied employment. I eventually worked throughout my career with homosexual, gay and non-gay patients in mental health services and eventually in AIDS hospice services at the height of that epidemic. 

I am barely homosexual now. I am 66 years old and minimally sexual due to physical ailments. However, I will be a gay man until I die ... by choice. Yes. That is a choice for some of us as homosexuals. If you consider yourself Catholic or Muslim or Mormon, I do not intend to offend you. I intend to educate you. The choices are yours, whether you believe them to be or not. You can choose to deny yourself a happy sexuality for your entire life. But that is not a healthy choice. Catholic priests and boy-abusing Taliban and an Orlando murderer are just some of the plentiful evidence to support that fact of human psychology. Make the healthy choice for yourself. Find the courage to live that choice, or seek the help you need to make that choice.