The Homosexual Agenda

Another one of those news stories in the blogosphere -- brought to my attention, in this case, by John Klima of Electric Velocipede -- has got me thinking. It's a story about how some bugfuck crazy fascist loon of a Senator in Alabama tried to pass a bill banning books by gay writers (or even just containing gay characters) from school libraries throughout the state. An All-American version of Section-28, this is another example of the idea that us evil faggots are out there "promoting homosexuality", preying on the kiddies, trying to twist their little minds and make them perverts, inverts... converts.

Yeah, I remember Section 28. I remember before it was passed, when I was a teenage faggot, growing up in Kill-me-fer-the-love-of-God-NOW (aka Kilwinning, Ayrshire, thirty miles South-West of The-Fuck-Out-Of-There, where I now happily reside). I remember that brainchild of the Iron Lady Thatcher when it was called Clause-28, and how fucking bitterly twisted it was that, you see, I was reading Catch-22 as the bill was going through, and, well, you remember that scene where Yossarian goes back to the raided whorehouse, and the old man's sitting alone? The American soldiers have been and taken all the whores away.

Why? asks Yossarian.

Catch-22, says the old man. All they said was Catch-22.

Did they show you this Catch-22?

They said they didn't have to. The law said they didn't have to.

What law?

Catch-22.

See, myself and this girl called Alana (if I recall correctly), we were on this debating society and muttering between ourselves, we thought, hey, we could debate this hot topic. I mean, I'm not gay, oh no, not me, says I, but I know people who are mutter mutter mumble mumble cover tracks and look shifty and embarrassed. So we go to the teacher who's running the society and we suggest it.

Now he was a great guy, Mr Olaf Olaffson (great name too). He was one of the first people to encourage me at writing; took me aside one day to talk about how good he thought one of my compositions was, took the time to give the kind of encouragement that might just have changed my fucking life. I was to later submit that very story to a writing competition judged by one Duncan Lunan of the GSFWC, and though I didn't even come close to winning, I got a letter back from Duncan inviting me to join his evening class in SF Writing. As far as I'm concerned, if it hadn't been for those early words of encouragement I might never have took the plunge, might never have actually thought of writing as a serious option, might have never learned the discipline, the skills of critique I got from the Circle. Hell, I just might never have been bitten by the bug the way I got bit, just from hanging with a bunch of guys all serious about being pro writers rather than just hobbyists.

So my point is, I got a lot of respect for Mr Olaf Olaffsen. I don't blame him for turning round and saying, no, sorry, you can't debate Clause-28. It might be seen as an infringement of Clause-28, you see. Promotion of homosexuality funded by the Local Authority. All it would take after all, would be a few angry parents to put his job at risk. I don’t blame him at all. There's a point to anger but it should be pointed in the right direction. No, that’s just what you get when the bigots make the laws.

So we can't debate Clause-28? says I, a faggot Yossarian in the face of this absurdity.

No. That's the law.

What law?

Clause-28.

As Yossarian might say, "That's some clause, that Clause-28."

So hearing about pretty much the same thing happening in Alabama makes my spleen rise. Frankly I don't care that the law got booted out because not enough legislators turned up to vote on it. Christ, that makes it worse. They didn't have the spine, the backbone, the fucking ethics to fucking turn up and say "No fucking way, Jose!" They were happy to just abstain, to stay neutral, to be complacent, complicit fucking cowards. Angry? It makes me fucking furious. I mean, I'm not into the poor-me oppressed minority attitude. I'm not yer rainbow-flag-waving, nipple-clamped, marching gayboy with a whistle in his mouth, tooting along to I Am What I Am. Really, I'm not the most community-minded person when it comes to the whole gay sub-culture thing. When I hear the words "gay village" I picture myself as Patrick McGoohan, running down a beach as a big white super-inflated condom comes bouncing after me.

I am not a disco number; I am a free man!

But now, oh yes, now, brothers and sisters, I can feel the fucking outrage, the fucking Relight-My-Goddamn-Fire burning bright and bolshie in my Big Gay Heart. This makes me want to carry the severed fucking heads of these fascist bastards down the streets, never mind sodding Gay Pride placards.

So Senator Gerald Allen thinks there's a "homosexual agenda". OK, motherfucker, you want a fucking homosexual agenda? I'll give you a fucking homosexual agenda.

I am faggot. Hear me snarl...

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We declare ourselves opposed to YOU. Yes, YOU, Gerald Fuckwit Allen. You and everything you stand for. You and everyone who stands with you. You and your whole sad and pathetic excuse for a philosophy. Your time is past. You are old news, old man, and we are the shape of things to come, the shape of things to cum and cum and cum again in the great big circle jerk that is the future. You are the past, old man. Step aside for us. Step aside for the 21st Century Bois.

Because we will not just stand against you, Gerald Fuckwit Allen. We will not just draw “a line in the sand”, batten down the hatches and defend our way of life in craven terror, bigotry and paranoia as you do. No, we will hunt you down and take the fight right to your fucking doorstep. We will unleash the full force of our fury in a hissy fit the like of which you've never seen. Handbags at dawn, Gerald Fuckwit Allen. We challenge you. We call you out, if you’re man enough to face us. Don’t worry. We don’t want to fuck your scrawny ass. We just want to kick it into next year.

But, no, we will not hurt or threaten you if you are too fucking chicken -- though we would dearly like to bash your fucking head in -- but we will humiliate you, working on your own fears, dancing around you in provocative fashion, leering and jeering. We will wave ithyphallic dildos in your face. We will drive you mad as Pentheus. We’ll see you walking through the streets of Alabama in your mother’s dress, your sanity smashed by this world you do not, can not, understand. You are mad already, Gerald Fuckwit Allen. We will simply show you this.

We will raise allies amongst the feminists, the anti-racists, the radicals, the liberals. All the voices of the Ethical Egalitarians will be raised together to drown out your Moral Minority with its vitriol and hate. We will shout over you when you are there and we will whisper when you are not. We will conspire against you at every fucking opportunity. We will plan and plot against you. We will steal the moral high ground and drive your no-good cant and rhetoric of righteousness right out of town.

Then by the power of our tongues we shall corrupt your sons. We shall whisper sweet obscenities in their ears, seduce them to our sins of the flesh. We shall show them that the body is a temple to be worshipped in, that all the joys and sorrows of mortality must be appreciated in the knowledge that we are the flesh, that we are creatures, living things which breathe and bleed and fight and fuck. We’ll turn them gay in all senses of the word.

We shall become prominent in the arts and media, offering role models to the young and impressionable, flouting your fucked-up, neurotic, anal culture of repression. We shall strut across the world stage, spreading our message of freedom and equality and shameless sensuality. We will recover the sexual idyll of our race, restore the heathen hedonism of ancient days.

We will create fierce faggot warrior heroes in our fiction, vital and virile as the gay gods and great queers of the old myths - Apollo and Dionysius, Adonis and Heracles. Yea, even as the oldest of them all, great Gilgamesh, had his little furry fuck-buddy, Enkidu, so shall our characters sashay across the stage, the silver screen, the small screen, through the very subtexts of our books and plays and movies, tongues in each other’s ears, hands down each other’s pants. And your sons will see them and want to be like them.

We shall sing to your breeder boys, give them gender-bending stars to slink across the dance-floor to. We’ll have them dancing to David Bowie, singing along to 'Oh You Pretty Things' in their lip gloss and eye-liner, pouting and mincing with the best of us. And you won’t have time to disown them, Gerald Fuckwit Allen; before you know it, they’ll have disowned you.

We will make a New Sodom of this world, and if your God tries to destroy it, we’ll damn well fight back. We’ll raise every buttfucker now burning in the fires of your Hell, and we will march on Heaven with the Devil at our side, tear down its golden walls. Your Christ is a weak copy of our pansy-prince Tammuz, motherfucker, Tammuz, who the woman wept for in Jerusalem long before you nailed your sacrifice to the cross so you could wash your souls clean in his blood. You have your Shepherd. Well, we have our own, Gerald Fuckwit Allen. We have Matthew Shepard, who died for his own "sins" on a fucking Wyoming hillside, you cunt, beaten to death by the ignorants you condone.

We will slay your Moral Absolutes. These dumb, petty taboos, these cretinous dichotomies of Righteousness and Sin, these mere mimicries of enlightened ethical judgement, have killed our boyfriends, our lovers, our friends, and we'll exact our vengeance on them. We will murder your Divine Decrees and drag their bloody bodies round the gates of Troy ten times. Then we will bring the very walls of your fucking philosophy down. Remember. Achilles was one of us, Gerald Fuckwit Allen.

One of your fuckwit buddies in the Right-Is-Might Brigade once said that Scotland was a dark land ruled by homosexuals. And if we have our way, Gerald Fuckwit Allen, we will prove him right. We’ll take Scotland first, and after Scotland, we’ll take Alabama. We will conquer the known world, as the greatest Muscle Mary of history, Alexander The Great, once did. We will take your citadels of education, put your small town mentalities to the torch. We will burn your preconceptions to the ground and fuck our boyfriends in the ruins. Queer Nation? We don’t think so small, Gerald Fuckwit Allen. All your bases are belong to us, motherfucker. One day soon.

So that’s my “homosexual agenda”. Fuck them... these Nazi fucks better ban my books because if I can be any sort of threat to their precious way of life, I’ll be doing my fucking damnedest. They better fucking burn them along with Gore Vidal and Truman Capote and William Burroughs before I (shock! horror!) undermine their vicious little hate-spawned lies. And while they're at it they can put Federico Garcia Lorca to the torch beside me; I’d be proud to burn beside him. But then, would Gerald Fuckwit Allen even know about a not-terribly-famous gay writer shot by the Spanish Fascists?

After all, he’d have to read a book on the faggot to learn about that.