THE SHEER INGRATITUDE

I have no delusions about the ethical base of most people under 50 today. All I have to do is look to my right while passing another car. It's likely the driver will be texting or talking on a hand-held phone or eating a sandwich while trying to do one or the other. No worries about driving a potentially lethal weapon weighing tons. Let's not even begin discussing people eating stolen food while shopping in the supermarket.

It is more annoying that the current leadership of some LGBTQIA groups and media outlets are anti-male and absolutely phobic about masculine sexuality. The high percentage of lesbians in these organizations may be the reason. I don't know or care. All I know is they are far removed from what was once joyfully called "Gay Liberation".

The gay-male-to-lesbian relationship is intrinsically dissonant. Gay men are generally not attracted to things womanly in bed. Lesbians (not bisxeuals, pansexuals or metrosexuals) are generally not attracted to things manly in the bedroom. And sexual attraction is at the very foundation of most peer human bonds. Even sexual revulsion can act as glue in a relationship by diffusing sexual tensions. 

What I am saying is that I get why youngish lesbians in power situations would experience the temptation to become castrating feminists. Since there is little danger these women will ever get close enough to a penis to actually sever it, I don't find their penis hatred nightmarish at all. I get it.

I do not get the attitude of many younger gay men. This is a different matter altogether. 

Homosexual men worldwide are waging life-or-death personal battles for safety while gay men in The West are becoming self-satisfied about hard-won rights. These Western gay men are lazy. They are sitting back and allowing the LGBTQIA brand to speak for them, while criticizing The Far Left in some cases. Apparently, they do not realize or accept that LGBTQIA now means "Far Left". 

The Far Left does not care about homosexual men in the least. It never has. When I was a young man in my hippy days, coming out to a longhaired counterculturalist could get you a punch in the face. Hippy culture was as homophobic as conservative macho culture, despite the revisionism of Hollywood portrayals. I was in the hippy culture of East Coast urban artists, actors and musicians. I was out. The straight hippies I knew were not very friendly and often defensive. 

Gay men of the Stonewall Era in America were indeed brave. I recently read a punk tweeting an opinion that gay men never died for their civil rights. The truth is that there is no real data to dispute his stupidity. Why? Because we were killed in alleys, cruising parks and our bedrooms. If the police suspected a murder of a homosexual man, absolutely no significant investigation was launched. 

The sheer ingratitude of some loudmouthed homosexual men on social media about the recent history of gay life in America is stunning. They openly blame older gay men for the HIV epidemic, for example. Some of the worst creeps in this regard are men under 40 who have contracted HIV through their own carelessness or addiction-related self-neglect. I suggest they rant at the mirror before taking to the keyboard to vent their rage.

We veterans of the pre-Liberation years who grew up in the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's, struggled to provide a safer environment for ourselves and those who come after us. If we succeeded in our professions while being out, we had to work hard and be better. We still were subjected to callous verbal slights in most cases, but we persisted. We were often skipped over for promotions. Our dollars, time, boycotts, marches and letters mattered, despite being challenged at every turn by the established order. Laws changed. Authorities are held to a higher standard. More doors are open.

It is easy to tell yourself that you deserve everything good in your life which came from the hard work of your predecessors. Most of us have had periods of acting like spoiled children, even when we have been old enough to know better. That is just being human and ignorant of what life could be without those benefits. 

I mean this essay as a form of education for younger gay men. You have lost the greater part of a generation of male elders through no fault of their own. They died in the tens of thousands without much notice in the early years of the HIV epidemic (early 1980's). They died young. They died miserably, painfully ... many alone. Some of them worked extremely hard for your rights as gay men before being killed by the epidemic. 

Gay Liberation has morphed from a demonstration of sober solidarity to a garrish block party. There is no sprawling cemetery of white crosses for those who fell to AIDS. Red ribbons had their time. The AIDS Quilt is folded away somewhere. Change is what happens to all things. Death is what happens to all human beings. Movements explode, flourish, mutate and die. 

Young gay men of today will be the elders of the next generations of more globally aware gay men. If they wish to be respected and validated for whatever they do to maintain homosexual rights/dignity and expand them to parts of the world where they now do not exist, they must set that tone themselves as part of the gay male tradition. 

Being resentful of and disrespectful of those who have gone before and managed to improve the life you now have is basically a form of self-denigration. Giving respect is how you get respect and keep respect.