Homophobia Inc; A Survey

Uganda is far from the only country
to criminalise being gay and lesbian.

The death penalty for a non-procreative
companionship and same sex intimacy
is also available in Iran, Northern Nigeria,
Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar,
Brunei, the two stans Paki and Afghani,
Somalia, Yemen, and finally Mauritania.

In total sixty five British Commonwealth countries
have laws that make homosexuality both inevitable
and illegal. We can be sure they would all threaten
to leave the Commonwealth if asked to modernise
their old colonial laws and, like the mother country,
accept what can't be regulated; sexual minorities.

I don't know which is worse for inspiring homophobia,
but whether their spur is Islam or colonialism,
these countries have good teachers in how to not forgive
those who are are unwilling, but natural, outsiders 
to a system, patriarchal marriage, which is meant
to benefit the few, wealthy men, and provoke
many more to a state of dis-ease, managed unhappiness.

 

To Know Yourself Is To Question Labels

Only 'Out and proud' gay men and lesbians
declare that they 'knew their sexuality since birth'.
I don't how they be so certain,
particularly when they are in such a small minority.
My uncertainty is not from a lack of empathy
with their lives, though I loathe the word lifestyle.
No, my problem is how with their sense of self belief
comes a sense of predestination, a determinism
they have unknowingly stolen, not merely borrowed,
from fundamentalist Christianity,
and from that ancient arch-critic of all sexuality, St Paul.
I accept that we all need surety. But to defend ourselves
by stealing the most brittle and inflexible arguments
of our enemies is to reverse ourselves into the loneliest
and most ignorant of intellectual cul-de-sacs.
Who in their maturity would want to do that?