http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber
Coming out to family and friends can be a traumatic experience even these days, worse when they don’t take the news too well. Give them time to get used to the idea, yeah? It can come as a shock to those who haven’t already guessed. Moreover, many people feel genuinely hurt that we haven’t confided in them sooner. Hurt can easily express itself in anger, an anger that many gay people are inclined to interpret as rejection. Sometimes, yes, they reject us for our sexuality and we have to try and win them round. In the early days, though, it may well be that they are angry with themselves for our not feeling we could trust them.
‘Win them over?’ I hear some of you protest. Well, yes. People who don’t grow up in a gay-friendly environment will often need time to put everything (usually bad) they have been told about gay men and women to one side and, hopefully, put love and friendship first. This may well put them at odds with their own family, friends, religion...whatever. So give them time to get their heads around it all, yeah?
Bear in mind it could just as easily be
you wearing blinkers, yeah?
Many people are ok about homosexuality and same sex relationships these days, at least here in the West... but by no means everyone. As for gay people living in the southern hemisphere, their families and friends may well have been brainwashed by bigoted religious leaders or socio-cultural traditions...whatever, to think the worst of us. Love and friendship may well overcome prejudices that run deep...but not always. It is hardly surprising that so many gay people in Africa, India, the Middle East, China etc. remain closet all their lives. It is a tragedy that cannot be overstated.
The fact that many gay people and those who seek to be reconciled with transgender needs are denied the opportunity to live openly with their sexual identity has to be one of the modern world’s greater tragedies. So much for a progressive 21st century! We can but hope humanity will quicken its step and see to it that there is real progress
world-wide in due course.
TIME FOR A REALITY CHECK?
I shed tears on my pillow most nights,
despairing of a homespun mentality
closing its eyes to how Human Rights
might extend to a person’s sexuality
A time came when I had to speak out,
tell the world not only that I am gay
but would not, for that, be put to rout
by cruel words ever chasing easy prey
See how cruelty borrows a human face
the easier to feed on an inhumanity
that respects neither person nor place
while binding its acolytes to apostasy
I felt so alone, nothing but dead ends
whatever conventional path I took,
no support from my family or friends,
life reading like a badly written book
I even took God (very) soundly to task
for providing no answers I sought;
then a voice in my head suggested I ask
what family and friends really thought
We hadn’t really talked anything through,
(I saw everyone as a potential enemy);
it now became obvious what I should do,
whatever people might think about me
Truth is stranger than fiction, people say,
and I had woven fictions around me;
True, some folks will despise anyone gay,
but blinkers off, the more clearly we see
Life rarely (if ever) resembles a fairy tale
or bedtime story (precursor to sleep)
but better drink from than fall into a well,
wake to promises fantasy can never keep
Copyright R N Taber 2010 (Rev. 2018)
[Note: An earlier version of this poem appears under the title 'Caught Out Wearing Blinkers' in
On the Battlefields Of Love by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2010]
