A former Archbishop of Canterbury, Doctor Rowan Williams has been quoted in the UK press as being okay with gay bishops so long as they remain celibate. Isn’t that rather like saying they can own a car so long as they don’t drive it?
We are often told (yes, even these days, in the 21st century for goodness sake!) that homosexuality is ‘unnatural’…and celibacy isn’t?
Here’s another poem from the Taber archives, written just a few months before I left school. I would have been 18 years-old at the time and have only recently knocked the original into shape if only to satisfy the poet I am now as compared with the scared, confused, far less articulate teenager I was then. Along with other poems I’ve written, at all stages of my life, it shows a determined lifting of guilt and an awakening realisation that I was not the disgusting person I’d once been given to believe gay people were. Even so, my brother, for one, was always making crass remarks about homosexuals. It didn’t help.
To be fair, I don’t think my mother ever told him or my father I am gay although they may well have guessed but never asked me outright. I suspect it would have made no difference. Whatever, I wasn’t going to pander to their homophobia. I was an emotional and psychological mess already without making things worse. Could they get any worse, I used to wonder? They did, of course, but managed to weather even the worst storms that would hit me in later life.
Thankfully, then - as now, 50+ years later - writing as well as nature came to my rescue, not to mention some delightful gay men …
Even in those dark days when gay relationships were illegal, I found a very special and meaningful acceptance in nature; only rejection and/or worse was on the agenda elsewhere. [Religion was never an option for me but this had nothing to do with my sexuality and wouldn't have been even if I were not gay. Even so, had I become the Christian of my upbringing, I would not have let being gay come between me and God, whatever the majority of Christians might say.]
No, I didn’t find love among the trees; that came years later. But I discovered how sex and people can be beautiful, also not everyone is a homophobe and being gay is neither ugly nor unnatural as I’d been given to believe at home, in school and just about everywhere I went for years.
“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson
DANCE PARTNERS or G-A-Y, BACK TO NATURE
We ran into trees
when no place else to run
and sought comfort,
found a deep peace and love
others would disown;
the trees, they welcomed us,
gave us sanctuary,
sang to us of another world
of long, long ago,
no less harsh in many ways
yet where its peoples
made time for its saplings,
proud of them all
We talked to trees
when no one else would listen
to what we had to say
and the trees, they understood
how it is to live
under threat, day after day,
subject to the whim
of who decides this, derides that,
claims to know
what’s in our best interest
in the longer term;
the loudest voice, but hollow,
an axe sure to follow
We danced with trees
after being escorted from the floor
for dancing cheek to cheek,
thought indecent behaviour then
by the less enlightened
among a heterosexual majority
inclined to see red
at any hint of homosexuality,
no thought for humanity,
(at best a well-staged sideshow);
morality a priority;
survival, left to a subjectivity
as dispensable as trees
Let the world grow old, memory pass,
the last trees left will watch out for us
Copyright R. N. Taber 1963; 2010; 2020
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