Gender's First Commandment - Get back in the closet
Homosexual men are being told not to say we love men and love our love of other men. Kavanagh says no. And it means no.
The 10 commandments of gender are miserable things. Thou shall not misgender. Thou shall hold sacred the puberty blocker and brook no truth in criticism. Thou shall harass and cancel lesbians. Thou shall covet thy opposite sex aesthetics and post depressing selfies saying “feeling cute”. Thou shall pile on. Thou shall cancel. Thou shall not hold the name of the gender Gods or their 200 stupid gender identities in vain. Thou shall pretend non-binary is not a stupid bourgeois confection. Thou shall not covet the truth or hold it up to the false gods and false witnesses ruling over thou.
And finally - thou shall keep quite about your male homosexual attraction lest you offend females claiming a trans identity.
Such is a recent injunction from gender borg acolytes who hold that while one is permitted to be possessed of male homosexual attractions simply articulating such is some sort of grievous offence against trans identifying females. Please note this call comes from Vichy gays in their endless purity Reconquista of us unruly and stubbornly homosexual males – I’ve seen precisely zero trans men say this much and many of them continue to be stubbornly reasonable and decent in the face of this sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, “get the hell back in the closet” chat. As ever, the minority community de jour is spoken over, it’s spoken for and it’s spoken around and about. Like Irish Republicans and Palestinians - trans is simply the latest minority for a set of allegedly counter establishment grievance mongers to exploit (though one notes they spend a good deal of time close to the establishment).
These awful traitors underestimate the spirit of male homosexuality as much as they seemingly appear to indulge it away from social media (for paradox here in the form of hypocrisy obtain always and often in gender). Our male homosexuality though is not some passing interest or occasional animation. It is not an hobby or a pastime. For us to live the way and be who we are has required of us all running a gauntlet of sorts from rejection, isolation and the many manifold horrible things that go with fighting - always fight. This is not some optional drop down list interest in a twitter bio. It’s not a matter we can or should be quiet about. It’s who we are. It’s what drives us. Each heartfelt male to male kiss is a private special sacred revolution. Each thrill at the true loving touch of two men is a break from the reality we grew up with. Each morning we are animated, as all men are, by one thing, the object of our love.
To confine our desires which drives us to a thing we cannot say is to steal from us the quintessence of what we are. The hollowing out of the spiritual essence of male homosexuality by decreeing that it must be mute is a grand theft, a robbery, a terrible fraud. If one can cannot speak of a thing, a beautiful thing, a joyful thing, one becomes a blunted thing. I speak as a man who happily writes poems about the joy and beauty I find in my own homosexuality, maleness and masculinity and male homosexuality more generally.
What is this world where I’m not permitted to say I am a man and I find joy and beauty in the symmetrical reflective true love of two male bodies? It’s a world without poems to male homosexual love for sure - as this injunction says articulating this is hateful. In a world with no poems to male homosexual love there is presumably thereon no songs, no plays, no art – in effect no true elegantly scattering of the human experiences of men loving men across blank sheets in poetry books, musical scores or the notes of playwrights.
We are to be an empty book, a blank page. The love, that once again, dare not speak its name for fear of offence. Plus ca change, seems we’re determined and destined always to arrive at this point but who would have thought the stewards and castigators would be fellow gay men. Blunting a homosexual imagination makes of a man a confined sad prisoner of a thing, for if you can’t write about your first and foundational love – the vehicle and manner in which you as a human achieve happiness – how will you write about or encourage happiness at all.
How will you be capable of art when politeness and apparently not offending people makes of you a bureaucratic thing silences by the unhinged HR department of the chatterati who compel and demand your silence. To stop a homosexual male celebrating and loving his homosexuality is to stunt our growth, our art, our disproportionate sway and power and influence over such things.
Our love is, I think, stronger than your hate that we say and take pride in who and what we are.
I can write more poems to my homosexual love than you can write tweets telling me to stay silent.
And I will not stay silent or be a quiet thing.
No.
That means no.
Beautiful and poignant as always. You are absolutely correct in observing that we become stunted beings when our right to articulate that which is truth, that which is beauty, that which is pain, is taken away from us. And why can those on the other side of the debate not recognise that the Q+ are straight???? It's as plain as day.
Shallow people who have no idea what they are dabbling with cannot define you or control how you express yourself. We are strong. We know what we are. Keep speaking your truth, firmly and consistently. We will overcome this.