The heterosexuals I grew up among
were as happy to talk down to children,
as they were to anyone they thought to be inferior,
about loyalty between partners within a marriage
as they were to secretively excuse male adultery
due to excess alcohol, as if the addiction
to alcohol itself were not also a form of adultery.
The heterosexuals that I grew up among
were not just homophobic, but sexually phobic,
reducing themselves and each other and marriage
to the process of a breeding machine which was careless
about what it bred. Whether that was people or values.
Their complexity was way beyond their expectations.
They were ignorant about what sexuality is
and how it was and is a key part of everyone's life.
What they said about homosexuality to anyone
who thought about or felt they had cause mention it
was that 'It is just a phase', as if by batting it away
it would cease to exist in their world,
when whether they talked about it or not,
when same sex attraction is part of every world.
What this little phrase hid was many centuries
of hysteria and denial, where mis-recorded histories
hid men and women who tried within their limits
to use their sexuality as an accepted part of themselves
for the good of those they saw around them.
As for me, I have learned to live with a sexuality
where I am better off being practically asexual
because my experience of heterosexuality,
the majority culture I can't avoid being part of,
has made me unfit for intimate and trusted use
by the secular, hypocritical, family values
that I have to accept that I grew up with.
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