Stereotypes, Daggers in the Heart

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

This poem first appeared on the blog in 2016.

I am not happy with the new blogger and wasn't when I was invited to try it some time ago. I had hoped we bloggers might  be given a choice  to continue in the old format, but it appears not, so I may not be blogging here for much longer. It is typical - in my personal experience - that so many people and organizations, even some shops, give little thought to how many older people like myself  - who do not have i-phones or android and struggle with internet technology, are easily confused, especially those of us living alone and have been struggling with other health issues long before the Covid-19 pandemic. However, I will see how I get on with the new format, but am not optimistic.

I am often asked to repeat the link to my informal poetry reading on the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square as my contribution to Sir Antony Gormley's One and Other 'live' sculpture' project in 2009. The entire web stream of 2400 hours is archived in the British Library:

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http://www.webarchive.org.uk/wayback/archive/20100223121732/oneandother.co.uk/participants/Roger_T  [ [NB: The British Library have confirmed that the video is no longer available as it was incompatible with a new IT system. However, it still exists and BL hope to reinstate it and make it available to the public again at some future date.] RNT

To suggest all gay men are paedophiles is every bit as absurd as it is to suggest everyone from any one socio-cultural-religious group is a terrorist. Tragically, stereotypes have a nasty habit of spreading and some people start mistaking them for truths which they duly pass on ...

I was only 14 years-old when I realised I am gay. Men I encountered at local gay cruising grounds were no paedophiles; on the contrary, they taught me how to think better of myself after being raised to think homosexuality is shameful. I did not feel able to come out to the world as a gay man for some years, not least because same sex relationships were illegal here in the UK until 1969; neither was I able to quite shake off the hostility I had met towards those like myself until much later, but thanks to those early encounters I was eventually encouraged to do so.  

The less enlightened among the heterosexual majority tend to forget that gay boys and girls, too, need to learn about sexual relationships; it is vital that sexual/ gender identity issues are discussed openly and intelligently in schools everywhere - including Faith Schools - so that children do not grow up with false, if not warped impressions, of what it means to be gay, bisexual, transgender or simply confused, even frightened by the way they start to identify with their sexuality as their teenage years kick in.. 

Sadly, various socio-cultural-religious agendas do no one who is not a diehard heterosexual any favours; consequently, even in a supposedly 'enlightened' twenty-first century, there are LGBT folks around the world, from all walks of life, forced to live their lives in the shadows or - worse - some dark lonely closet, such as I once did for years.

STEREOTYPES, DAGGERS IN THE HEART 

I’ll be your friend a child told an old man,

but he shook his grey head, sighing;

the child took careworn hands in his own,

sad to see already rheumy eyes crying

I’d love to be your friend said the old man

but some people will get the wrong idea;

they’ll be looking at you and looking at me,

and feeding old lies to imagination, I fear

It’s time I was on my way said the old man,

I’ve been warming this bench too long.

"Go child, and have fun, as much as you can,

it doesn’t last, innocence, being young…"

The child ran off, puzzled by catching Gran

throw daggers at the kindly, lonely old man

Copyright R. N. Taber 2005; 2016

[Note: An earlier version of this poem appears in A Feeling for the Quickness of Time by R. N. Taber. 2005.]