Comment

Oct 09, 2013
Plagues are communicable diseases, so the best communicators in a culture are the ones who are taken first. They take the young, the beautiful, the strong, the smart, the rich and the well-connected and leave behind the old, the infants, the isolated, the deformed, the ugly, those with mental health issues. Thus any plague will hollow out a culture from the center. When the die-off approaches 50% of the general population of a culture, the culture itself will begin to die. This happens in plague after plague. With the diseases that killed off American Indian cultures, one of the biggest casualty of smallpox was actually the Indian languages. Enough people survived to repopulate, but what they knew about was different from what came before. We have the same problem with the AIDS crisis. The complaint of Septum is valid. He is indeed lonely. To be a living gay man over 50 in America in 2013 is a sign that during the seventies there was something wrong, something that didn't allow that man to connect fully with a proud emerging gay culture that was centered on random physical acts. So what do we do? Well, we build another world. We work to institutionalize long-lasting gay relationships. Maybe not for ourselves, but for our children. One thing that's fairly easy to do is to pray to the gay saints for comfort. (It's a two-way street: praying to them as a gay man allows them to exist as gay saints) They are St. Sebastian, Mother Theresa, and Saint Matthew Shepherd who was martyred in Wyoming on a barbed-wire fence in 1998. Try praying to them. It might give you comfort.