Just Ruminating

I was barely 18 years old; not that being 18 was any sort of a milestone or carried any special privileges or obligations. Back in the day, being 18 was a whole lot like being 17; just a year older. We couldn’t legally drink hard liquor, vote, or incur a contract. Hell, in most states we couldn’t marry unless we had mommy and/or daddy’s written permission. We could, however, register for the draft or enlist in the military without saying, “Mother, may I?” I suppose that made it a fair trade-off.

Anyway, I was 18 years old, just out of boot camp, and a couple of weeks aboard my ship. The Navy decided I needed some learning so they cut me a set of orders, bought me a plane ticket to San Francisco, told me to pack my ditty bag and get going. When I landed in San Francisco, I had a couple of changes of clothes, a carton of smokes, and a whole dime in my pocket. I used the dime to call Treasure Island for someone to pick me up.

That didn’t go well. Maybe if I had been wearing a uniform with some gold on the collars, they would have been more accommodating. Since my uniform had only an arm patch with two shiny white stripes on it, they left it to me to figure it out. I stepped outside the terminal, asked someone to point me in the right direction, stuck up my thumb, and commenced to figuring it out.

Between the terminal and the bus stop, where an old black man I’d asked for directions bought me a ticket to ride because no military man should have to hitchhike, damn near every queer in San Francisco stopped to offer me a ride. For any politically correct readers, I use “queer” in a historic sense. That was long before gay meant anything other than happy or the apparel to be donned at the yuletide – and I’m not sure what that was about.

Now, if ignorance was a felony, I would have been doing life without parole. The sum total of my world knowledge might have taken all of three or four paragraphs to inscribe. That said, by 18, I knew that queer meant something other than ol’ Uncle Jake who wasn’t wrapped as tightly as he should be. You know, sitting here typing these words and thinkin’ while I do it, I’m not at all sure that I was familiar with the word “homosexual.” I was one, naïve country bumpkin.

I’m not going to tell you that anyone got ugly with me. I’m not going to tell you that I went medieval on anyone. The come-ons were low key and polite. My “no thanks” were more in the line of “this is where I get out.” I wasn’t angry. I just didn’t want any part of whatever they were proposing and was perplexed as hell as to why they thought I would have even the remotest interest. By the time I got the hell out of San Francisco, I was seriously wondering if there was something about me that I didn’t know; else-wise why would all of those men be hitting on me?

There’s been a whole lot of water over the proverbial dam, and under the same bridge, since then. While my ignorance still outweighs my knowledge by a considerable amount, I have learned a few things since I set out on the sometimes-tumultuous river of life.

Yes, wondering if I was subconsciously gay was a troublesome thought in spite of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. It took a while to realize that a guy hitting on me was no different from me hitting on a woman. You never know what’s going to happen until you make a move. As far as I could ever tell, homosexuals and lesbians don’t have a secret handshake to identify one another and gaydar isn’t always reliable.

I am amazed that, in this day and age of relative enlightenment, so many are driven to homophobic-induced spasms of paranoia. I don’t understand why they are frightened of the gay community. With all the empirical evidence to the contrary, they can’t possibly believe that homosexuality equates pedophilia. Surely they can’t believe the manner in which someone expresses their sexuality makes them somehow less of a person.

The screaming mantra that same sex marriages will forever destroy “traditional” marriage is beyond my ken. The thought that anyone’s marriage can impact negatively on anyone else’s marriage is both specious and incomprehensible. With the divorce rate hovering somewhere around 50%, it seems to me that traditional marriage is hell bent for leather on destroying itself.

I don’t have a clue how the Supreme Court will rule on the Prop 8 challenge in California. It stunned me when Prop 8 passed. In my regrettable ignorance, I thought Californians were past thinking the gay community was a subspecies that rendered them ineligible for American citizenship.

The Court may well declare it to be constitutional. I’m thinking, if they do, that is going to create one hell of a slippery slope. If a vote can render someone less than a citizen, I have to wonder who is next. Will it be a racial or ethnic group?

Tyranny by the masses is still tyranny.

Life is sweet – but parts of it can be unjust.