Queer, Male, Transsexual, and Het-Enforced Gynocide: The Liberal Destruction of Radical Lesbian Communities of Resistance

image is from here

For this discussion and often on this blog, “Womyn” and “Lesbians” means the following: human beings raised in patriarchal environments to be girls and women; women who, from birth onward, were identified, labeled, and mis/treated as female human beings are meant to be mis/treated according to patriarchal will and ways; women who were mis/treated as girls throughout their childhoods; intersex people who were raised to be girls and women and who were mis/treated as girls and women by men in their communities and the larger societies in which they have lived and died.

As a gay male, I see the destruction of Womyn's and Lesbian community as a key strategy to keep heterosexism strong and powerful. In the last 25 years it is Radical Lesbian community and activism that has been one of very few on-going oases of revolutionary political activity against the male flood of patriarchal hostilities and oppression, including hostilities and oppression organised and maintained by gay men.

Currently, in my experience, elite/privileged het and trans activists control or try and control discussions about what oppression is, what privilege is, and what bigotry is. Nowhere in those discussions do I see any regard or respect for Radical Lesbian or Womyn's community and it's value (the necessity of it) to revolutionary action to end CRAP. I know a few region-, race-, and class-privileged trans and queer people have spoken out about the need to respect Womyn's and Lesbian spaces. But that doesn't go far enough, in my opinion.

One of the most pernicious lies about Radical Lesbian and Womyn-centered community is that it only exists in the US and that it is only or all white. Neither is the case but it may well also be the case that for many reasons having to do with survival, we will not be hearing from most Radical Lesbians. For one thing, most Lesbians do not speak English as a first or only language. For another, Radical Lesbian politics and practice has been so intensely put down and marginalised out of any Western Queer Theory and Practice that it appears to me to be the case that contemporary White and Western Queer Theory and Practice is virulently anti-Lesbian and anti-Radical. Meanwhile, it is positioned or promoted as being anti-human, meaning, anti-male and anti-trans. Why it is that pro-male supremacist and pro-trans activists don't challenge one another's anti-Lesbianism and anti-Womyn practices is a matter of revolutionary significance, in my view.

Anti-Lesbian homophobia, or lesbophobia, and racism, classism, misogyny, and heterosexism are woven into or embedded in contemporary public Queer discussion (academics call this “Discourse”). Het society has never regarded Radical Lesbian Politics as anything other than man-hating and “too extreme”. To write off a key site of political organisation and resistance is one way to ensure that revolutionary political movement won't take root. 

How could it be that less and less Radical Revolutionary Lesbian Politics is “good” for us? If the us is Lesbian and Gay, how does it serve our interests to understand our contributions to Queer discussion and action as “only transphobic”, “too extreme”, and “man-hating”? We already know that the man-hating charge is perhaps the most successful het- and male-privileging and het- and male supremacy protecting political accusation leveled at Womyn and Lesbians.

The charge of “transphobia” in some marginalised groups, has social capital in ways that the charge of being anti-Lesbian and anti-Womyn does not. Why is that? Ought we know why that is? Ought we openly discuss it in Queer groups? 

Hostility to Radical Feminism is as old as Radical Feminism. Hostility to Radical Lesbian Feminism is at least as intense. Het men across race, sexuality, and region, demonstrate an abiding hatred of Lesbians, Womyn, and anyone regarded as a girl or a women, whether or not they are (such as, for example, so-called 'feminine' men and gay men. Het men also demonstrate a virulent hatred of het and 'feminine' and butch women, Lesbian or not.

Where is the organised opposition to this profoundly entrenched misogyny? I can tell you one place it isn't: within and among gay male communities and activists. Needless to say, organised opposition to anti-Lesbian and anti-Womyn misogyny doesn't exist in het-dominated communities either.

I have had the unfortunate and on-going occasion to witness how some grown male family members mis/treat their young male children. A portion of a day does not go by without rigid and oppressive policing of the male children's presentation of their maleness as identified and understood by the older men around them. The boys are publicly and privately ostracised by male family members if the boys do not “man up” properly—according to the standards and practices of homophobic and misogynistic men. So if a boy doesn't firmly and strongly shake a grown male's hand, or flaps his hands by his side as he walks or runs, he is scorned and ridiculed in a systematic effort to get him to be a “proper male” which means, necessarily, being anti-gay and anti-woman (as well as anti-Lesbian and anti-Womyn).

Anti-gay and anti-lesbian practice is like CRAP-affected air: it is all around me and it is a potent pollutant I endure and do my best to ignore. Metaphorically speaking, when I open my eyes and lungs to this toxin, my eyes sting and my chest burns and constricts. It is difficult to convey in words exactly how overwhelming and hateful this heterosexism is. It is difficult but not impossible for me to imagine how hateful the combo of heterosexism and misogyny is. It is difficult but not impossible for me to imagine how hateful the combo of heterosexism, misogyny, anti-Lesbianism, and anti-Womyn attitudes and behaviors are. Add to that racism. Add to that classism. Add to that the oppression by white Westerners of those who are not “First World”, or who are immigrants of color, or who are speakers of ESL. Or elderly. Or disabled.

Nowhere in my dysfunctionally heterosexist family is there any regard or respect for Womyn, for Lesbians, or for anti-patriarchal, anti-het or Womyn- and Lesbian-affirming attitudes and behaviors. Nowhere. Not in any minute of any day. While some lip-service is paid to liberal feminism—rarely—no such respectful acknowledgment of Radical or Revolutionary Lesbian and Womyn-centered community and resistance to woman-hating is noticed. This is only partly because it is not allowed in any dominant media, so my family has no idea it exists. They do know transsexual people exist and while they will demonstrate little else other than misunderstanding and fear, they do not believe transsexual people ought to not exist. They do believe this about Butch women, Lesbians, and Womyn-centered womyn—who they understand to be not much more or less than heretics and pariahs. 

My family is Christian and white. Also poor and working class. Their level of protection and privileging of hetness is so intense, so unrelenting that no one in my family who has considered gay or lesbian existence for themselves has been able to talk about it with anyone other than me—or so they say to me in private. (A publicly het male cousin, for three years, summoned me to have sex with him in motel rooms. I complied and obliged. It's not something that was “not pleasurable”. It's also something that I do my very best to avoid engaging in ever again because it was so invisibilising of me.)

So while I know that within the last three generations there have been non-het and non-feminine women, and non-het and non-masculine men, it is not discussed or tolerated or—whitemaleskygod's heaven forbid—celebrated and actively supported.

The lack of celebration, respect, regard, and support for Lesbianism, for Womyn-centered existence, for Revolutionary anti-patriarchal practice, cannot be overstated. 

My concluding questions for now are these: Why does a similar level of disdain and disregard for Lesbians and Womyn who are politically engaged in the project of protecting and supporting Lesbian and Womyn's space, community, theory, and activism, exist so strongly in contemporary elite/privileged Queer spaces, communities, theories, and activism? Why is there no systematic and on-going elite/privileged Queer opposition to the theoretical positioning, the liberal political practice—of naming Lesbians and Womyn as primarily or only oppressors to Queer and Transsexual people?

This just in from Mike J. McCreadie: he believes I am "a f*cking c*nt" (without the asterisks)--sent from his iPhone

portrait of Edith Sitwell is from here

 "I am patient with stupidity, but not with those who are proud of it."
— Edith Sitwell

Mike J. McReadie, someone I do not know at all,  felt it to be very important, in times of trauma and suffering around the world, to send me this urgent message. One wonders what else he does with his time. I post it as evidence of the kind of person he is, and for the record given past death threats against me. Does this make him both a misogynist AND a "misandrist"?? (Assuming he thinks I'm a man, that is.) I have modified the four letter word below by putting in a hyphen where the "u" would normally be.

fromMike   mjmccreadie777777@gmail.com

sender-time Current time there: 10:36 AM. ✆ to "aradicalprofeminist@gmail.com" date Sun, Mar 13, 2011 subject Ur a fucking c-nt mailed-by gmail.com signed-by gmail.com

Sent from [Mike's] iPhone

Tony Porter on "The Man Box" (short video): on oppressive masculinity and het men's choice to be humane instead

This is only eleven minutes long and any man you know who is misogynistic, sexist, or just plain callous about women or girls, must see it. He's very good. I think many men will be able to "hear him". Honestly. Part of the story was intense for me to listen to, but he took it to exactly the right moral place. TRIGGER WARNING: This video contains the story of the gross sexual assault of a girl by many males.



http://www.ted.com/talks/tony_porter_a_call_to_men.html

or

http://www.wimp.com/mencall/

Please share liberally with all men.That's about all that can be done with this perspective on patriarchal masculinity. There's nothing too radical about it. Or overtly pro-feminist, either.

(Here's the transcript, which I found *here*, on 16 April 2011.)


Transcript after the jump (thanks to DECIUS for posting it in the comments):

I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx. Growing up as a boy, we were taught that men had to be tough, had to be strong, had to be courageous, dominating — no pain, no emotions, with the exception of anger — and definitely no fear — that men are in charge, which means women are not; that men lead, and you should just follow and do what we say; that men are superior, women are inferior; that men are strong, women are weak; that women are of less value — property of men — and objects, particularly sexual objects. I’ve later come to know that to be the collective socialization of men, better known as the “man box.” See this man box has in it all the ingredients of how we define what it means to be a man. Now I also want to say, without a doubt, there are some wonderful, wonderful, absolutely wonderful things about being a man. But at the same time, there’s some stuff that’s just straight up twisted. And we really need to begin to challenge, look at it and really get in the process of deconstructing, redefining, what we come to know as manhood.

This is my two at home, Kendall and Jay. They’re 11 and 12. Kendall’s 15 months older than Jay. There was a period of time when my wife, her name is Tammie, and I, we just got real busy and whip, bam, boom: Kendall and Jay. (Laughter) And when they were about five and six, four and five, Jay could come to me, come to me crying. It didn’t matter what she was crying about, she could get on my knee, she could snot my sleeve up, just cry, cry it out. Daddy’s got you. That’s all that’s important.

Now Kendall on the other hand — and like I said, he’s only 15 months older than her — he came to me crying, it’s like as soon as I would hear him cry, a clock would go off. I would give the boy probably about 30 seconds, which means, by the time he got to me, I was already saying things like, “Why are you crying? Hold your head up. Look at me. Explain to me what’s wrong. Tell me what’s wrong. I can’t understand you. Why are you crying?” And out of my own frustration of my role and responsibility of building him up as a man to fit into these guidelines and these structures that are defining this man box, I would find myself saying things like, “Just go in your room. Just go on, go on in your room. Sit down, get yourself together and come back and talk to me when you can talk to me like a –” What? (Audience: Man.) “like a man.” And he’s five years old. And as I grow in life, I would say to myself, “My God, what’s wrong with me? What am I doing? Why would I this?” And I think back. I think back to my father.

There was a time in my life where we had a very troubled experience in our family. My brother, Henry, he died tragically when we were teenagers. We lived in New York City, as I said. We lived in the Bronx at the time. And the burial was in a place called Long Island, it was about two hours outside of the city. And as we were preparing to come back from the burial, the cars stopped at the bathroom to let folks take care of themselves before the long ride back to the city. And the limousine empties out. My mother, my sister, my auntie, they all get out, but my father and I stayed in the limousine. And no sooner than the women got out, he burst out crying.

He didn’t want cry in front of me. But he knew he wasn’t going to make it back to the city, and it was better me than to allow himself to express these feelings and emotions in front of the women. And this is a man who, 10 minutes ago, had just put his teenage son in the ground — something I just can’t even imagine. The thing that sticks with me the most is that he was apologizing to me for crying in front of me. And at the same time, he was also giving me props, lifting me up, for not crying.

I come to also look at this as this fear that we have as men, this fear that just has us paralyzed, holding us hostage to this man box. I can remember speaking to a 12 year-old boy, a football player, and I asked him, I said, “How would you feel if, in front of all the players, your coach told you you were playing like a girl?” Now I expected him to say something like, I’d be sad, I’d be mad, I’d be angry, or something like that. No, the boy said to me — the boy said to me, “It would destroy me.” And I said to myself, “God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?”

(Applause)

It took me back to a time when I was about 12 years old. I grew up in tenement buildings in the inner-city. At this time we’re living in the Bronx. And in the building next to where I lived there was a guy named Johnny. He was about 16 years old, and we were all about 12 years old — younger guys. And he was hanging out with all us younger guys. And this guy, he was up to a lot of no good. He was the kind of kid who parents would have to wonder, “What is this 16 year-old boy doing with these 12 year-old boys?” And he did spend a lot of time up to no good. He was a troubled kid. His mother had died from a heroin overdose. He was being raised by his grandmother. His father wasn’t on the set. His grandmother had two jobs. He was home alone a lot. But I’ve got to tell you, we young guys, we looked up to this dude. He was cool. He was fine. That’s what the sisters said, “He was fine.” He was having sex. We all looked up to him.
So one day, I’m out in front of the house doing something — just playing around, doing something — I don’t know what. He looks out his window, he calls me upstairs, he said, “Hey Anthony.” They called my Anthony growing up as a kid. “Hey Anthony, come on upstairs.”

Johnny call, you go. So I run right upstairs. As he opens the door, he says to me, “Do you want some?” Now I immediately knew what he meant. Because for me growing up at that time, and our relationship with this man box, do you want some meant one of two things, sex or drugs — and we weren’t doing drugs. Now my box, card, man box card, was immediately in jeopardy. Two things: One, I never had sex. We don’t talk about that as men. You only tell your dearest, closest friend, sworn to secrecy for life, the first time you had sex. For everybody else, we go around like we’ve been having sex since we were two. There ain’t no first time. (Laughter) The other thing I couldn’t tell him is that I didn’t want any. That’s even worse. We’re supposed to always be on the prowl. Women are objects, especially sexual objects.

Anyway, so I couldn’t tell him any of that. So, like my mother would say, make a long story short. I just simply said to Johnny, “Yes.” He told me to go in his room. I go in his room. On his bed is a girl from the neighborhood named Sheila. She’s 16 years old. She’s nude. She’s what I know today to be mentally ill, higher functioning at times than others. We had a whole choice’s-worth of inappropriate names for her. Anyway, Johnny had just gotten through having sex with her. Well actually, he raped her, but he would say he had sex with her. Because, while Sheila never said no, she also never said yes.

So he was offering me the opportunity to do the same. So when I go in the room, I close the door. Folks, I’m petrified. I stand with my back to the door so Johnny can’t bust in the room and see that I’m not doing anything. And I stand there long enough that I could have actually done something. So now I’m no longer trying to figure out what I’m going to do, I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to get out of this room. So in my 12 years of wisdom, I zip my pants down, I walk out into the room. And lo and behold to me, while I was in the room with Sheila, Johnny was back at the window calling guys up. So now there’s a living room full of guys. It was like the waiting room in the doctor’s office. And they asked me how was it. And I say to them, “It was good.” And I zip my pants up in front of them, and I head for the door.

Now I say this all with remorse, and I was feeling a tremendous amount of remorse at that time, but I was conflicted, because, while I was feeling remorse, I was excited, because I didn’t get caught, but I knew I felt bad about what was happening. This fear getting outside the man box totally enveloped me. It was way more important to me, about me and my man box card than about Sheila and what was happening to her.

See collectively, we as men are taught to have less value in women, to view them as property and the objects of men. We see that as an equation that equals violence against women. We as men, good men, the large majority of men, we operate on the foundation of this whole collective socialization. We kind of see ourselves separate, but we’re very much a part of it. You see, we have to come to understand that less value, property and objectification is the foundation and the violence can’t happen without it. So we’re very much a part of the solution as well as the problem. The center for disease control says that men’s violence against women is at epidemic proportions, is the number one health concern for women in this country and abroad.
So quickly, I’d like to just say, this is the love of my life, my daughter Jay. The world I envision for her, how do I want men to be acting and behaving? I need you on board. I need you with me. I need you working with me and me working with you on how we raise our sons and teach them to be men — that it’s okay to not be dominating, that it’s okay to have feelings and emotions, that it’s okay to promote equality, that it’s okay to have women who are just friends and that’s it, that it’s okay to be whole, that my liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman.

I remember asking a nine year-old boy. I asked a nine year-old boy, “What would life be like for you, if you didn’t have to adhere to this man box?” He said to me, “I would be free.”
Thank you folks.
(Applause)

The Best Self-love Story is Not My Own: A Struggle Towards Presence and Wholeness

photograph is from here

Many children and teens have needs for connection, for touch, for pleasure, and we are all easily coerced and can also be coercive (whether through force or pleading), to get our needs met at the expense of someone's humanity. This happened in my life. I engaged another person, a few years younger, in a sexual relationship when I was seventeen. He was my cousin.

"Love" didn't drive me to manipulate him. "Love" didn't drive him to want the acts to continue. Nor did basic respect and regard.

I abused him. And the dynamic, fully set in motion by me, shifted over a few months to the point that he was more interested in being sexual than I was. That's what I did to him: My interactions with him amped up his sexual desire for a form of sex with me that was not connected to care or concern for someone's human well-being. By me self-servingly instigating sexual contact with him, I was one of several males who showed him what he was worth.

Though my actions, he learned how to use others sexually, including me. In front of him and his therapist, I took full responsibility for getting that manipulative choreographed period of my abusiveness and selfishness going, for initiating and continuing actions designed to get my needs met at his spiritual expense. I was not being considerate of him. I was not concerned to know about his history of other abuse (of which I had no knowledge at the time). Concern about how he'd already been harmed might have interfered with me getting my needs met. I was not particularly interested in knowing how my actions might later impact his life. I sexually abused him. And I used him also.

[written by me; the source of this, in a slightly different form, is *here*, in the comments section.]

At nine, I was clear about a few things:

I knew the world I was in didn't welcome or want my feelings in their raw state. And, in order to hold them all inside, I had to create spaces in me for them to be put away. When people ask me how I am feeling, the most honest answer is this: "I don't know. I could take a few guesses though--if you'd like for me to."

I knew that there was something to do with race that was quite awful, tyrannical, evil. It had to do, in my world, with what whiteness was and how it was supposed to be expressed, as a ruling force. It had to do with people who were not white being considered less than human, while whites were considered something more than human: geniuses and saints, for example. White stories never told the whole truth about anything, I came to find out. And the stories of the most evil expressions of whiteness cannot be told without some whites shouting "It's a lie!! That never happened." Never mind the past; it is happening right now.

I also knew there was something going on with gender, although I didn't have that term when I was nine. I knew that the way society was organised meant that some kinds of boys--white, athletic ones--were highly valued, and other boys were not valued as much. Boys like me were not valued at all. And this put me in close proximity with girls, who were despised by boys for reasons I could only determine to be jealousy--jealousy that girls could express some range of emotion that boys didn't dare reveal (even while they felt all the same feelings as girls).

At nine, I began to consciously dis-identify with boys and identify with girls. But well before then, at age three and four, I was very sensitive and relational. I bonded strongly with one care-giver, who was related to me but was not my mother. My mother was ill. My feelings of sadness about my mother's life is a blanket not easily cast off. Her despair is a deep pit I can fall into with her. She's more of a sibling to me, really.

By the age of seventeen, I was feminist-identified. I also knew--well before then--that I was not heterosexual and that heterosexuality was not humane, really. It was presented as natural, but was so obviously maintained by forces quite unnatural, very social, very political. If heterosexuality were so very natural, it wouldn't need force to support it at all. And men who claim to be het wouldn't feel so very, very threatened at the mere suggestion they might not be. And they wouldn't have to prove their heterosexuality in such anti-loving ways against the bodies and minds of girls and women. I call that orientation many men have towards women, "haterosexuality". It's not love.

In my fondness for boys and later men, there was a kind of longing for connection that I couldn't explain. I wanted intimacy and closeness, but sex threw me back against myself. Sex was powerful, terrifying, and bleak. Sex was loaded up with nightmares that I didn't understand. But it was also filled with dreams as yet unrealised. One time, when sixteen, I had a lovely emotional-erotic relationship with a teenage boy. I was year older than him. We were in bed together, naked, and our lips met, open mouths, not kissing, but breathing each other's air. This felt like life to me. He was ripped away from me like a needed rehydration IV drip tube by a cruel doctor. The cruel doctor was his evil step-father. My first intense emotional connection with a boy ended with him being torn away and moved away.

I then made a go at heterosexual relationship with a young women I liked very much and enjoyed the company of. These feelings were mutual. I respected her a great deal. She had more romantic feelings for me, filled with hopes for feelings from me I couldn't feel for women because I wasn't heterosexual and also because I loved women too much to do to them what het routinely men do to women. (Turning them into objects, possessions, things to be controlled, manipulated, destroyed.) I had no desire to do this with or to women. I felt possessed by my feelings for boys and later men. Before she and I got involved, I had told my girlfriend this--of my relationship with the boy, for example; that I was not heterosexual. I'm thankful I did that. Because males betraying women is a common occurrence, and I wouldn't want the burden of feeling as though I had betrayed her.

My ex-boyfriend also got involved with a girl after we were separated by force. I think we both gave up on finding love with males. The damage of his evil step-father's disdain for him left permanent scars. The world would be cruel to such boys. That was clear. Almost as cruel as het boys were to girls or men were to girls and women. But not quite that cruel. Nothing is quite that cruel, really.

I later fancied myself a lesbian. I fancied myself a lesbian separatist. (A celibate one.) I longed for this option, which was completely impossible. Since I couldn't be with males in any emotionally real way, publicly, why bother?

A het male friend of mine--we've since parted company on good terms--told me last year of his choice to stop playing male-dominant romance games and sex games with women. And he spoke of his choice to be celibate. This was a choice I had already made, but not at all for the reasons he made it. He knew he needed to unlearn his mastery of seduction of women. He was too good at, which means there was too much dishonesty in it and too much betrayal of women's souls. And of his own. He knows he isn't here to be an oppressor. He is not white, by the way.

In his period of celibacy, he told me of a romantic, affectionate connection he had with a woman his age. They'd hold hands, publicly, and find a bench in their city and would sit, curled up in each other. Once they spent a whole night like that, outside. This was a new way of being for him. It was quite wonderful. It opened him to her and to himself. I was happy for him. But it also made me sad.

I asked him to imagine never being able to be affectionate with any woman publicly. To imagine a world that would threaten or enact violence if he dared show any woman any degree of romantic interest, affection, adoration, desire, sexual longing. Even, for example, sitting across a restaurant table from her, looking too long into her eyes without speaking. That if he even indicated this kind of interest or desire or affection, let alone demonstrating it publicly, overtly, he might be beaten to death, or, at least, there would be men who would desire to do this to him and to anyone he was with.

I told him, "That's my world." He thought about it seriously for a moment, and then banished the feelings he felt when the thought sunk into his body. He purged himself of the knowledge of that life. He couldn't bear it. I live it and he couldn't bear it, and so it made me wonder: How do I bear it? I bear it by denying myself any possibility of finding love with any man. I bear it by destroying the possibility of it. I bear it by being both celibate and asexual.

One of my most accomplished acts of self-destruction is something I've written about here before. But for those who missed that telling, I'll go over aspects of it for you now.

Ten years before turning forty-eight, just over a decade ago, I was with someone sexually in ways that I didn't think was emotionally possible for me. All my longing for intimacy and affection--even for mouths meeting--was cast aside because a man wanted sex with me, regularly, monthly, in motel rooms or in any place he happened to be living. I never let him into my place. I had learned by age thirteen that men can want sex from you in ways that result in them getting it, or taking it, or ripping it from you--they take far more, of course, and what they leave you with is horror and emptiness. I'd learned to think that the only reason any man would want me emotionally was to get at me sexually. This man wanted sex, and didn't know very much about affection or intimacy--most especially with and toward himself. He was lost to himself, especially since he was sexually assaulted by the same man who assaulted me when I was twelve.

The predator got to each of us probably within a couple of months of each other. Who knows how many other males he abused, or females. This shared history--a co-nightmare--was never spoken of between us, although I tried to speak with him of it in our adulthood. He couldn't do it. He still can't.

We didn't speak too much at all, actually. He'd call me. He'd let me know where he was. His call meant he wanted sex. He didn't have to ask for it and I didn't have to consent. That's good, in that I wouldn't have been able to consent, so it's good we by-passed that formality. He called and his want was my desire. I went to please him, and did so. However he wanted to be pleased, that's what I did. I didn't feel abused by him, only used. Except once when he bobbed my head up and down on his penis. Then I didn't feel human at all. But I was, more typically, regularly used, without any stated objections from me. This is how I know consent-based laws on rape and assault mean nothing. Women around the world have sex with their husbands because to not do so is to be beaten. So they willingly allow themselves to be used as things. There's no consent: he pulls her into a room and fucks her. Her will is not to have sex; her will is to not be beaten. That's their "sex life".

That's the sex life of too many married women--women married to men. No one, it seems, wants to fully acknowlege that reality and so men's voices flood in at this point noting how they don't treat women like that and never would. And women's voices flood in saying, "I like sex! I want it and I enjoy it and often I'm the initiator with my boyfriend/husband!" And I say, "That's good. I'm happy for you. Now, what about all the women for whom that isn't the case? Shall we be concerned about their happiness, or is that too much of a downer?" They don't wish to discuss it. Women turn away. Men scoff. And they need to tell me again how much they like sex, and welcome it, and how good it is for everyone on Earth, if only people would let go of their shame about it.

I know they like it. I believe them. But the people who step forth to say how much they adore their country don't, in any way, speak for those who are being destroyed by it. And that destruction causes shame and it creates vast expanses of silence. So when these people who love sex ask around for who doesn't love it as much as they do, there's lots of shame in people who are confused by what sex is for them. And the sex-lovers take the silence as consent that everyone loves it as much as they do.

With that man, in the motels, who was het to the world but not in his desires, I also felt "this is it; this is all you'll ever get from men". He was my cousin. (He still is.) I don't see him any more. I don't see him in part because if he wanted sex I can't say no. I've never said no to him. I value self-destruction too much for that. I have a hard time saying no to all forms of self-neglect at once. I've yet to figure that one out: how to love all of me at once. Or, how to love myself enough to stop being so self-neglectful. But I love myself enough to avoid him and to not take his calls, which fortunately have dwindled down to almost never occurring.

Self-love is what I want for women that I can't manage for myself. I love women in a way I can't love men. That's not something most het men or gay men understand in the least. I understand it. And I live it.

Happy Valentine's Day, to all the readers out there who are women and gay men. I hope you are not being abused today by anyone. I pray you are not married to a man who is a terrorist, or are with a callous user of your body. I hope you are not bonded to someone who cannot love you. I hope you know love, for your self most especially. If you do, let me know how you got there.

It's not true that if you cannot love yourself, you're incapable of loving others. It may be true that for wholeness and presence, both must happen simultaneously.

Here is a love letter I wrote to someone once:
To Andrea, With Love

Here is the best self-love story I've ever read:
First Love

Love to you, dear reader. Do something special for yourself today. And I'll do the same. Something that feels like love.

[This was slightly revised on 15 Feb. 2011.]

Hope Beyond Tragedy: To ANY QUEER, LESBIAN, OR GAY YOUTH: Reach out to those you know who will not hurt you. Find support. WE ARE HERE FOR YOU. Suicide is a terribly permanent solution to a temporary problem. Love exists for you.

image is from here

image is from here

To any queer youth of any color or age--any gay boys, lesbian girls, transgender teens, intersex or intergender children, teens, and young adults reading this, please do one thing: get support from adults and peers who care about you and find support instead of committing suicide. We are here for you (click this link).  

Find adults who will listen but who will not exploit you. We are here for you (click this link). 

Find compassionate people who understand the pain, isolation, and ridicule and torment that can come with being young and not heterosexual or "normally" gendered. You are fine the way you are. There are people out in the world who will respect you and emotionally support you without harassing and exploiting you. We are here for you (click this link). 

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT) Youth Support Line
800-850-8078
Gay & Transgender Hate Crime Hotline
1-800-616-HATE

With condolences to all the loved ones of each of these youth and teenagers who took their own lives. And to all queer youth and adults who are bullied, harassed, exploited, abused, and neglected: there is support, help, and hope for you. We are here for you (click this link).

When I was 16, my first ever boyfriend (who was 15) was taken away from me, moved clear away, by his evil-acting step-father who didn't want his step-son being anything other than heterosexual. I was never identified as heterosexual, and I always knew other queer youth, which helped me feel not entirely alone. I am the only out gay, lesbian, transgender, intersex, intergender, or bi person in my family, however, which has done nothing to make me feel less alone.

My boyfriend and I saw another queer youth, more targetable than we were, enduring grotesque levels of harassment and also rejection at home. We stood with him when walking down the hallways, whenever possible. Of course that meant people would assume we were gay too. Well, we were.

The stories which follow of teen gay male suicides are so frequent lately that it's nearly impossible to keep track of the details of each boy's own struggles leading up to his death. What we know is that a form of U.S. terrorism more benignly called heterosexism, homophobia, lesbophobia, and transphobia in school systems and beyond them remains rampant. This form of terrorism, against children and young adults of all genders, all ages, all colors and cultures and ethnicities, will not be dealt with appropriately because, in general, school administrators want to keep their schools pro-heterosexual and anti-gay/lesbian/transgender/intersex. That's the truth of it. Now, how do we deal with that level of institutionalised anti-queer bias and bigotry? We support our youth, for one thing. Out loud. Not only out of view. And we demand more from heterosexist society and its protectors, because our youth need more protection that does heterosexism. Heterosexism isn't being threatened with extinction anywhere by anything. But our youth are taking their own lives at an alarming rate.

Below are too many new stories of gay boys losing their lives for no good reason at all. They want to escape humiliation and emotional torment and pain. But surely our community can be publicly supportive in ways that we have not, as yet, been, in order to help these children and young adults know there is hope beyond the torment. The last piece in this post is a message from a popular U.S. white gay activist and writer and his spouse, on their hell in high school and love together beyond it.

This first boy, Asher Brown, came out as gay to his parents in the morning. And later that day he committed suicide due to being bullied.

From LGBTQ Nation:

With heartfelt condolences for all the loved ones who grieve and remember these gay youth and one gay adult.

From LGBTQ Nation:

Indiana teen’s suicide thought to be result of anti-gay bullying

LGBTQ Nation • Tuesday, September 14, 2010 • Comments (10)
 

A 15-year-old Indiana teen took his own life last week in what is thought to be another suicide at least partially connected to school bullying, a result of the teen’s perceived sexual orientation.

Billy Lucas (via Facebook)

Billy (William) Lucas, a student at Greensburg Community High School in Greensburg, IN, was was found dead in a barn at his grandmother’s home Thursday evening — he had hanged himself.
Friends of Lucas say that he had been tormented for years. [WTHR-TV]

“He was threatened to get beat up every day,” friend and classmate Nick Hughes said. “Sometimes in classes, kids would act like they were going to punch him and stuff and push him.”
“Some people at school called him names,” Hughes said, saying most of those names questioned Lucas’ sexual orientation, and that Lucas, for the most part, did little to defend himself.
“He would try to but people would just try to break him down with words and stuff and just pick on him,” Hughes said.

Decatur County Coroner Doug Banks said Lucas left a note, but that it didn’t refer to bullying or blame anyone; Lucas reportedly never self-identified as gay.

A Facebook memorial page created in Lucas’ honor, begins with this bio: “Everyone made fun of him at school and he couldn’t take it anymore so he decided to end his life”.

Related Posts:

• Rutgers student jumps to his death after roommate posts video of gay encounter on the internet
• Gay teen dies after 10 days on life support, following suicide attempt over anti-gay bullying
• Another suicide: Houston teen, victim of anti-gay bullying, shoots himself
• California boy on life support after suicide attempt -- another case of anti-gay bullying
• Dan Savage has a message for gay teens facing adversity: 'It gets better'

*          *          *

From Queerty.com:

BULLIED TO DEATH: Seth Walsh, 13, Dies After 10 Days On Life Support After Suicide Attempt

And just as we're saying goodbye to eighth-grader Asher Brown, who shot himself in the head after enduring anti-gay bullying at school, comes word fellow 13-year-old Seth Walsh died after 10 days on life support following a hanging attempt.

13 year old Seth Walsh, died of suicide attempt following anti-gay bullying

The Tehachapi, California teen spent the last few years being tormented by classmates at Jacobsen Middle School. He made it only two weeks into the current school year before being transferred to an independent study program.

Last Sunday, Sept. 19, he was found unconscious and not breathing after apparently trying to hang himself from a tree branch. He was airlifted to a local hospital, where he remained on life support until this afternoon, where he died surrounded by family. He leaves behind his grandmother Judy Walsh, mother Wendy Walsh, and three siblings, ages 11, 17, and 18. Police, meanwhile, say they cannot prosecute any of the kids responsible for his torment, since school bullying is not a crime. ("Several of the kids that we talked to broke down into tears," says Tehachapi Police Chief Jeff Kermode. "They had never expected an outcome such as this.")

His death follows Brown's suicide in Texas, and 15-year-old Billy Lucas in Indiana. Like Walsh, Lucas hanged himself after enduring relentless teasing and torment inside the walls of his school.

There will be a memorial service on Friday at 3:30pm at the Tehachapi First Baptist Church.

Go tell your sons and daughters, your brothers and sisters, your friends … that you love them. And then tell Kevin Jennings, President's Obama always-silent safe school czar and the founder of GLSEN, to start speaking the fuck up.

[Above, a YouTube tribute to Seth from what appears to be his sister. It includes the caption, "He wonderful this picture is because he's so happy :) I am too because I know he will be back. ... He will wake up we all know it."]

Read more: http://www.queerty.com/bullied-to-death-seth-walsh-13-dies-after-10-days-on-life-support-after-suicide-attempt-20100928/#ixzz10zVf0Pyc

From the comments posted *here*:

Frank Lundburg 1 hour ago

I denied myself the dignity of accepting I was gay until I was 50 years old. Before that I had worked for a governor(D) in Idaho...Looking back I was passed over for a lot of things which affected my career..."He's single and never been married" and stuff like that...At the time I didn't even believe I was gay -- In hindsight I've known since I was 5 years old...Regardless my fears and sometime's I suspect correctly folks perception of me cost me lots in my career and cost me lots in my confidence in myself...I'm 66 years old now and still don't feel free to be myself...And I actually think the folks I voted for two years ago are afraid of people like me...As liberals they know they should like gays but actually they don't like them very much...

From CNN:

 

 From Americablog Gay:

Another gay youth suicide -- roommate secretly filmed him hooking up, put video on twitter, kid killed himself shortly after

Posted by Joe Sudbay (DC) at 9/29/2010 03:56:00 PM

This story just hurts to read. It's painful:

A Rutgers University freshman killed himself after two classmates used a hidden dorm room camera to splash his sex life across the internet, sources told the Daily News.

A distraught Tyler Clementi, 18, left his wallet on the George Washington Bridge before plunging to his death in the Hudson River last Wednesday, sources said.

A Twitter post from one of the students accused of streaming the sexual encounter live on the internet indicated Clementi, a renowned high school violinist, was with another man.

"Roommate asked for the room till midnight," read the post from Dharun Ravi, 18. "I went into Molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay."

The Twitter post went up Sept. 19 - three days before Clementi's suicide.

So, awful. It just hurts.

There have been a number of teen suicides over the past couple weeks. Truth Wins Out reports "In September, there have been three gay teen suicides as a result of school bullying." That's just wrong.

What kind of messages were our elected leaders, like John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, sending to young LGBT Americans when those Senators launched their vicious, homophobic attacks on gay and lesbian servicemembers last week? They were denigrating the worth of all LGBT Americans. It was sick. And, those deranged, obsessed religious right-types, led by Tony Perkins and Maggie Gallagher, send the same message. It's pure hatred and it's despicable.

Over the past few days, several sent me the video Dan Savage and his husband, Terry, filmed for the It Gets Better Project. It does. Every gay kid should watch this. It does get better --- and it's worth it:

An Objective and Subjective Experience of The Gender Hierarchy, Gender Identity, and Radical Social Transformation, Part 1

image of two children playing jump rope is from here

SUMMARY ABOUT THIS POST:
This is a series of posts about the effects of promoting ideas and analyses of gender that are not explicitly connected to the reality of male supremacy. Part 1 discusses children, gender stereotypes, social stigma and status, the problem of turning complex social realities into binaries, and of pretending those binaries aren't enforced. Also, this post poses questions about how race, gender, and sexual orientation are conjoined. There are also photos of some guys I think are CUTE. 

The conclusion of the series of posts will, I hope, make the case that social justice movements dealing with gender (and race and class and sexual orientation) are strengthened by offering up an intersectional perspective and by not playing down the reality of male supremacy.

Is it important, when speaking about gender, to note that it exists to maintain male supremacy? Is gender always related to race? What about race to gender? Is interest in jumping rope a sign of one's race, gender, class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation? If yes, how? If no, why do some boys get made fun of for doing so in social spaces where girls also jump rope?

To approach this subject and these questions, I begin here: I am intergender, male-assigned and privileged, and white. (See the "About me" section of the blog, on the right side, along there somewhere above the never-ending list of websites of interest and blogs I link to for a link to what "intergender" can mean. It follows the quotes and recommended reading and has been recently revised.)

When I was a child, I didn't quite "get it" about their being only boys and girls and I sure didn't get it that there were *only* two races, although Three Dog Night tried to liberally convince me in songs like "Black and White". I knew there weren't just two classes either, but sometimes media made it sound like if you weren't rich you were poor, and if you weren't poor you were rich. I also didn't accept that there was only one "good" way to have a sexual identity, which was always an off-shoot of a gender identity--kind of like the gender identity was the prerequisite to having a sexual one. You have to want to believe that "sex" is only about gender to even "go there". I refuse to "go there".

I got that there were those two social categories, and I also got that I wasn't really either one of them. It gets tricky when trying to describe to you what I was. One could say I was "in between" being a boy and and a girl, but given how different boys are, amongst themselves, and how different and diverse girls are, amongst themselves, this doesn't really work for me as an adequate way to describe my experience. For example, I didn't live in a social space between a so-called "tom-boy" girl and a butch boy. Nor did I live in the middle of a continuum between polar ends of being a so-called femme girl and a femme boy. Or between being a butch girl and a femme boy. Or between a femme girl and a butch boy--however you understand such terms which are, of course, culturally, ethnically, regionally, and era-specific to be sure.

I liked spiders and snakes and toads and frogs and insects. (See, "spiders" are NOT insects, and I knew that when I was a child.) I like seeing birds and squirrels, not shooting them. My brother liked shooting them. I thought he was the anti-animals version of a sociopath. I liked playing with some dolls--not "baby dolls" but dolls like Barbie, but not Barbie herself, as she was too popular to hang out with people like me. I played with girls whatever girls liked to play, including card games, hand clapping/song games, and just talking about people. But if girls liked doing the things that boys traditionally or stereotypically liked to do, I didn't hang out with them. And the butch het boys--forget it. They were TOTAL losers. ;) I don't really mean that. They weren't total losers. They were the group that most put me down, though, and I learned to avoid them as much as was socially possible, especially since I lived with one who called me his brother. (Little did HE know!) I liked chess and I liked pop music, television games shows but not soap operas. I hate boy-team sports but loved the Olympics, especially girls' Gymnastics in the Summer Games and all of the Figure Skating in the Winter Games. Now I'm infatuated with Apolo Anton Ohno who's been in Short Track Speed Skating in three consecutive Winter Games. My interests have shifted over time. But not my attraction to some men.

image of Apolo Ohno is from here

Currently, the cutest guy on TV, well, until last night when he got tossed off the show, was Jose Ruiz, from So You Think You Can Dance. The sweetness in those eyes and that smile!!! O. M. G. Just melt me down and call me liquid butter. (Below is the only photo I could find that shows him smiling and close up. Jose's someone who is a great example of what might be termed "subjectively" beautiful. He's objectively beautiful too, but it's seeing him in life, not in a photo still, where his beauty really shines.)

image of dancer Jose Ruiz is from here

Here is another photo of him:

Jose Ruiz, publicity shot from TV show, So You Think You Can Dance

Is he sweet or what?!

Even though I can still have these little crushes of celebs, currently I am asexual and aromantic, as much as possible. I didn't use to be either. I an not anti-sex and The Amazing Feminist Texican can verify that this is the case, as she and I have exchanged thoughts and analysis on sex, including on vibrators, and none of my views reveal that I believe sex is bad, just plain negative, wrong, or gets you a one-way pass straight to hell--wherever the hell HELL is. Being anti-sexism isn't being anti-sex, after all. Unless you can only experience sex AS sexism, in which case you're likely to misinterpret critics of sexism as being "anti-sex".

And being critical of gender as a system of political terrorism, force, violation, subordination, and domination is not to be *against* people with standard gender presentations or identities, any more than being anti-corporate patriarchy makes me *against* workers at McDonalds or Wal-mart. It is, however, to note the difference between workers at Wal-mart and the Walton family of Wal-mart. The former has almost no structural or institutional power to effect significant social change. The Walton family DOES have the resources to make a significant difference in the lives of ALL of their employees. ALL of them--all the many hundreds of thousands of them. That's the difference social/structural position makes.

As I see it--and I'm not alone--gender systems exist inside conjoined systems of race, inside of oppressive economic systems, and within systems of of global political dynamics like globalisation and the invasion and violation of the Global South by the Global North. These conjoined social hierarchies include whites believing and maintaining institutions that place them over and against people of color; similarly: men over and against gay men and all women; the middle aged over and against children and the elderly--should people live long enough to become elderly--and long enough to become children, for that matter.

I refuse to see "gender" as if it existed independently of those other realities. This isn't to say that I can't, for theoretical and analytic purposes, discuss "gender" without always talking about everything else. It is to note that should I do that, I'm necessarily abstracting people's real lives.

No one, these days, who lives in a society with media and industrialisation has an experience of gender than isn't raced and classed. That isn't shaped by heterosexist racist patriarchal imperatives and capitalist forces.

A white pro-radical feminist male view might seek to see what is patriarchal about race and class. What is gendered about whiteness and being wealthy. What is stigmatised and statused as "the degraded feminine" and "the glorified masculine".

But *this* profeminist (you know, as opposed to the other three to five--lol) will also keep turning over these phenomena, mixing and matching them, to see what is raced about gender as well, because with an understanding of intersectionality, deeper truths may be highlighted.

I grow weary of race analysis that forgets how gendered race is. Similarly with gender analysis that forgets the gendered people are raced.

The issue for this post is to what extent "subjective" and "objective" understandings of gender, in oppressively raced, sexual, classed and globalising contexts, supports radical coalition work towards the liberation of all people from oppressive systems in which some are dominants and some are subordinates, and many are both, depending on which parts of their lives we are discussing.

Here's one reality: a wealthy white gay man may exercise his power in a variety of ways. He may have stock market investments that support genocide and rape globally. He may choose to purchase an apartment building in a city where neighborhoods are experiencing racist/classist gentrification, thereby supporting the oppressive displacement of poor people, making some of them homeless. He may get beaten or called horrid names any day by any het man who seeks to express his homophobia against the nearest gay man to him. And he may participate in gay or heterosexual cultural events that are deeply misogynistic and racist, as well as heterosexist and classist. He may make fun of women who are heavy or of women who are... women.

The queer-identified people I know in the cities and sections in which I have lived are mostly white. Most of my friends are people who do not live near me. And most of my friends are not white. This means I get many views into queer and non-queer society.

With these multiple views, different truths are highlighted. Just as with the old parable about several blind men feeling a different part of an elephant, not realising they were ALL experiencing one being, so too do those of us who look at reality through one lens miss out on the whole of what we are looking at.

Gender is, first and foremost, political and enforced. It is secondarily social and institutionalised. It is, third, personal or individual, mediated in many ways. Fourth, it is tied to what is often called biological/asocial phenomena, such as the shape of genital tissue, the levels of various hormones in one's system, and chromosomal patterns. What gender isn't at all is "natural" as that term is commonly used in public discourse. A social justice movement which seeks to reverse this order is doing something that is VERY political, and VERY pro-status quo, and VERY oppressive: misogynistic, racist/white-empowering, oppressive to the Global South, genocidal, and ecocidal.

To make "gender" a primarily personal-individual-subjective matter is to deny the enormous force that is in no way purely "subjective" that is exacted against all of us to maintain male supremacy and patriarchal atrocities against the bodies of those deemed girls and women .

Dominant U.S. society wants us to all believe that gender is primarily natural, biological, and chemical--that it is a reality that is best intervened on with chemicals, medications, surgeries, and other "treatments" that seek to normalise and reinforce it as an oppositional binary: one is a man or one is a woman. And, if "transgender" one is a man (or boy) in a female body or a woman (or girl) in a male body. Or, maybe, on is also intersex and intergender and, honestly, dominant society just doesn't want to deal with that, other than to deny intergender reality exists, and to surgically change visually intersex people to "appear" more normal. Normal is always oppressive in a society in which norms exist to reinforce oppressive institutions.

If I am outside, in a social space, a police officer makes determinations about how dangerous I am based on many criteria--some highlighted more than others depending on where in the world I am. If I'm near the border in Arizona, the shade and hue of my skin as well as facial and other physical features are scrutinised, to determine if I might be "Mexican". In a white-majority/white-dominant/only white rural area, my class presentation might be most paid attention to, along with my gender presentation, including the degrees to which I stand out as possibly "gay".

As a white, male, intergender, non-intersex, adult person who is registered and treated socially as a white adult male, as, in many ways, a "man", I get how gender is both subjective and objective, and how that distinction is artificial on many levels.

I played jump-rope with girls rather than basketball with boys during elementary school recess. Many boys and very few girls took issue with me doing that (even though professional male boxers played jump-rope). Why? Because my actions were threatening to the boys, but far less threatening to the girls. The boys--most of them het--were shoring up their gender identities by socially reinforcing their sexist attitudes, their misogynistic practices and jokes, and their girl-excluding behavior. To see someone who appeared to be a boy willfully and joyfully engaging with girls in what the boys saw as "girly" behaviors, meant their own sense of themselves as "appropriate boys" was threatened. Because if I WERE a boy, and was playing jump rope with girls (while not in training to be a professional boxer), how could THEY be boys and need to refuse to do so?

Their solution at the time was to fuse sexuality* and gender into terms like "faggot", "sissy", and "queer". This, in their minds, kept me "other" than what they were--or so they delusionally thought. That I wasn't any of those things didn't matter to them.

(*among the males, we were, most of us, pre-pubescent then and were not being willfully sexual with anyone, while surely a percentage of us, myself included, were being or had been sexually abused)

You might ask, "Julian--you WERE queer, weren't you? I mean I get how you'd not want to claim those degrading terms, but you were, well, 'odd' as someone perceived to be a boy wanting to play with girls in activities that boys steered clear of BECAUSE they were things girls did on the playground?" I'd say "No, there was nothing 'odd' about it. Nothing more 'odd', let's say, than liking The Partridge Family. Because here's the secret the "appropriate boys" didn't want you to know: they ALSO liked watching The Partridge Family, but felt too ashamed to say so, socially. What may well have been odd about me was my willingness to publicly align myself with girls who did so-called 'girly' things.

What we experience that is "subjective" is shaped by objective realities. Objective realities, like misogynistic violence, are bound tightly to idea and ideologies that some people are deeply invested in, financially, and in other ways, such as by fusing one's egoic identity to these ideas and ideologies.

I watch males who present as boys and men engage in practices and behaviors that shore up their identities and senses of self as "masculine"--and that is a highly conditional and relative thing. What it means to be "masculine" varies from culture to culture and era to era, as well as across region and across generations in one family.

What it meant to be a "masculine" male-man for my maternal grandfather was VERY different than what it meant to be "masculine" male-man for my paternal grandfather. My own father's ways of being "masculine" were not in accordance with white non-Jewish forms, in many ways.


End of Part 1. See the images below of people jumping rope--and you tell me how era, region, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and gender are related to each one--get busy, now: this assignment is due before Part 2 appears on this blog!

image of children, female and male, playing double dutch is from here

image of a very strong man, Mohammed Ali, jumping rope is from here

image of teenage boys playing jump rope is from here

image of a bronze casting depicting two girls jumping rope is from here

image of a girl jumping rope is from here

What Most Christians Don't Want You to Know about Jesus: a Top Ten List

[image of poster is from here]

In this post I am bringing Jesus Home, from Those who Stole Him, 

Misunderstood and Misused Him to Promote Their Homophobic, Patriarchal, 

White Supremacist, and Corporate Capitalist Agendas of Atrocity.

It's time. Or past time. Perhaps it is centuries past time. Or perhaps someone ought to have had a good talking to with Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul, giving those Jewish men a heads up about how people who would come to call themselves "Christians" would almost completely misunderstand and misuse Jesus-the-person to promote their own patriarchal agendas and project their own needs for a Father-God who is also a Son.

A month or sometimes a week cannot go by without someone approaching me--a Jew who is neither atheist nor theist--with the idea that "You need Jesus". What they mean is "You need to believe in this cultish religion I've decided is The Truth because I've taken in the delusions and distortions human beings have spoken and written about Jesus and I MUST believe they are true--my faith in my cult depends on it." That's what they usually mean. Some are more good-hearted. Some approach me with a kind of condescending compassion that makes me want to vomit. Some with an arrogance that makes me want to spit in their faces.

Regardless of their reasons and anti-Jesus-while-"Christian" ambitions, they won't get away with it here at A.R.P. Jesus will be spoken about respectfully here as the Jewish person he was, not the Christian God he wasn't.

Let's begin with a few basic truthful facts, as opposed to the kind many Christians preach, promote, and proselytise.

Jews in the time and region of Jesus (while he walked the Earth) didn't tell history the way contemporary Western Christians often do--as a set of facts that are understood to have actually occurred in ways that are not open to interpretation and contradiction, discussion and disagreement.  

Christian Fundamentalism is a deeply and dangerously anti-Jesus phenomenon.


What most Christians don't want you to know about Jesus: a top ten list.

1. Jesus was not ever a Christian, nor did he ever advocate that anyone be a Christian.

2. Jesus was not THE son of G-d. He was, as all of us are and each of us is, a child of G-d if we're going with the metaphor of G-d as parent.

3. Jesus used metaphors to make his beliefs and experiences more comprehensible to his audience. Making G-d a "Father" was not something Jesus believed a "truth". He used the language as a device to convey deeper meaning to his listeners. Jesus was a Jew, and while Jews frequently defaulted to various patriarchal metaphors, any rabbi who has studied and experienced G-d, knows that G-d does not have a gender, a sex, or a patriarchal personality.

4. Jesus was not pro-capitalist, and anyone who honors and respects capitalism as a social good that should be made sacred or should be worshiped is behaving in a way that is anti-Jesus.

5. Jesus was not a white supremacist or a racist. Jesus was also not ever white. (Whiteness didn't exist when he lived, for one thing. And Jesus was Semitic, or what would now be called a person of color.) Anyone who believes Jesus was white and behaves as though whiteness is better than any other politically constructed and enforced racial identity is not behaving in accordance with the teachings of Jesus.

6. Jesus was not homophobic and was not an anti-gay or anti-lesbian bigot. He didn't speak on the subject but he did stand with the oppressed, the marginalised, and the socially ostracised and disempowered, the castigated and degraded, and not with the corrupt power-brokers of society. If you are homophobic, heterosexist, and anti-lesbian or anti-gay, you are behaving in a way that is anti-Jesus.

7. Jesus was not anti-woman . He was pro-woman; he held Mary Magdalene as his closest disciple, an equal to him, not beneath him. He never said she was a prostitute. A comma in the New Testament has been ignored, as Jesus, according to that biblical story listed people he encountered including Mary Magdalene and a prostitute. He stood with women enslaved in systems of prostitution, not in patriarchal, misogynistic judgment of them. If you are anti-woman, including against women who are trapped in systems of prostitution, you are behaving against the teachings of Jesus.

8. Jesus was not born from the womb of a woman who was "a virgin" if by "virgin" we mean a woman who had never had sexual intercourse. She may not have had sexual intercourse willingly: she may well have been raped. Joseph, quite possibly, was not his biological father but was a man who took care of Jesus' mother, Mary, after she was raped. Regardless, Jesus had a biological father, not a heavenly one. A sperm and an egg combined and Jesus was born, like every other human being on Earth. The notion of Mary the Mother being a "virgin" is a misread and mistranslation of a term that more accurately means "maiden" or very young woman.

9. Jesus was opposed to the worship of Man, of Mankind, of Men and of Patriarchal societies, particularly and outspokenly against the one he lived in that was governed and ruled by the Roman Empire, which, as all ought to know by now, was lethally anti-Jesus. The Roman Empire was coercive and corrupting of some of his people, the Jews. If your values and practices are pro-man-worshiping, believe in the man as the only appropriate head of household, or head of state, or if you are in any other ways pro-patriarchal, you are anti-Jesus.

10. Jesus was not resurrected in any way that is different than any other human being. In other words, he was not uniquely resurrected. The Resurrection spoken about in the New Testament is metaphorical, and a device to communicate something about our spiritual nature, not only Jesus'. He was not a kind of human being metaphysically different than others but he has been made into one who is metaphorically different. He was a human being, like me and like you, who noted that we are not just animals as "animals" were understood in that anti-Indigenist framework and culture: all beings are and all being is divine. All of Life is Divine. He welcomed people to know and experience this. If you believe Jesus was qualitatively different in his humanness; if you believe he was a fundamentally more metaphysical being than anyone else; if you believe he was "more spirit" than any Indigenous, Wiccan, Taoist, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindi, Jewish, agnostic, atheistic, or pagan person, you don't know Jesus.

Now spread THAT word.

Peace to us all, collectively, when we realise we are not entirely separate beings who need warfare, social hierarchies, rape, racism, and civilisation. When we join with revolutionary feminist women and revolutionary Indigenous warriors in the effort to radically transform all patriarchal and genocidal societies, we may begin to collectively know peace on Earth--if Earth survives what industrial and corporate patriarchal civilisation has done to it.

We may know peace, love, and joy in the mean time as well, in a way that is sometimes termed "individually" by those who may limit our being to the distortions of a kind of living-experience not promoted by Jesus. We may know peace, love, and joy by reminding our apparently individual selves who we really are: waves on the sea of non-separate Being that are simultaneously and paradoxically Many and One.

We may know peace, love, and joy when we accept and experience, against much Christian mis-teaching, that G-d, which is not male and is not a man; which doesn't live only in (as) the sky--which lives equally as Earth; which doesn't look down upon us as a patronising father might; which is not in us, or outside us, or above us, or beyond us.

G-d is not a being who is fixed in some sort of sacred portion of outer space. G-d is Being and Becoming. In this sense, G-d is not theistic and theists are wrong about G-d. G-d is non-theistic, not atheistic as that term is commonly used by that arrogant bunch who call themselves atheists.

G-d is us--all of us, and is all that is not us' G-d always has been and always will be becoming this in ways that our limited human minds register as paradoxical and perplexing.

G-d is not Giant Ego that cares one bit whether G-d is referred to as Jesus or "Christ" or Buddha or Krishna or Abraham, or "Allah" or "God" or "Great Spirit", or Goddess, or G-d or any other name that humans can speak or write. For G-d is authentically unspeakable and ultimately unknowable by humans who believe they are not part of all Being as a wave is part of the sea.

To promote one name for G-d, including the term G-d, or Christ, is to not understand AT ALL what Jesus was preaching about and experiencing. It is, rather, to be egotistical and arrogant, lost in one's own private being and ego while often pretending one is doing what Jesus spoke about as seeing and knowing G-d. Delusions about G-d, or about Jesus, or about other human beings, or other Life, will not serve us in our collective quest to find peace, love, and joy on and with Earth and its Biosphere, which is, metaphorically and not-so-metaphorically speaking, our parent.

There is no heavenly Father. There is "us" living in a nightmare of our own making, in part by not understanding what Jesus and Buddha and Indigenous Spiritual Guides were, are, and said.

Wake up from the nightmare. Now.

Know yourself as Being. Sit humbly in the knowledge that G-d is not absolutely or objectively knowable to you, and that you have no moral business going door to door or nation to nation to proclaim that you, and your people uniquely know what G-d is and wants better than any other people who know G-d or Buddha-nature, Goddess or Great Spirit.