Monday, January 11, 2010
11th january
I've been looking through old photographs to hand some over for an interview in a magazine.
I'm struck by the incredible richness of our life as a family: and all its manifold opportunities for happiness and pleasure.
Opportunities I never really made the most of. Because I was tormented by this feeling of being in "the wrong body" in ways I could neither control or understand.
I look at my old masculine, suffering self, with increasing liking and compassion.
Almost physical attraction. I can't help but notice what a handsome charismatic fellow this John could be.
And yet I never knew it while I was that person.
This fills me with sadness.
Yes, and compassion: because whatever that feeling was about, I could simply do nothing about it.
Except what i have done now.
A woman called Iris Robinson is hugely in the news just now. Her husband is leader of the Democratic Unionist party and First Minister of Northern Ireland.
She is 59, my age exactly, and fell in love with a young man 40 years younger than her. And lent him a considerable amount of money to set up his own business.
Neither her husband or herself declared any of this when they were suoposed to declare their business interests as ministers.
More importantly for her, adultery is severely frowned upon in the unforgiving fundamentalist church to which she belongs.
Adultery is condemned as fiercely as homosexuality; and she made some vile public statements about homosexuality being an abomination as she took office.
For she is a senior politician herself.
So it's understandable that many LGBT commentators feel a quiet kind of satisfaction at her downfall.
I feel sorry for her myself, in my usual way. She might as well get some compassion from me, as she will get none from the vile god she worships and serves.
I suppose also I can't help noticing how similar in her way is her case to mine. Like me, he became uncontrollably gripped by a passion she simply could not resist.
Apparently she is in a mental hospital just now. I hope she emerges safely from it: and with a little more humility and compassion.
I've been looking through old photographs to hand some over for an interview in a magazine.
I'm struck by the incredible richness of our life as a family: and all its manifold opportunities for happiness and pleasure.
Opportunities I never really made the most of. Because I was tormented by this feeling of being in "the wrong body" in ways I could neither control or understand.
I look at my old masculine, suffering self, with increasing liking and compassion.
Almost physical attraction. I can't help but notice what a handsome charismatic fellow this John could be.
And yet I never knew it while I was that person.
This fills me with sadness.
Yes, and compassion: because whatever that feeling was about, I could simply do nothing about it.
Except what i have done now.
A woman called Iris Robinson is hugely in the news just now. Her husband is leader of the Democratic Unionist party and First Minister of Northern Ireland.
She is 59, my age exactly, and fell in love with a young man 40 years younger than her. And lent him a considerable amount of money to set up his own business.
Neither her husband or herself declared any of this when they were suoposed to declare their business interests as ministers.
More importantly for her, adultery is severely frowned upon in the unforgiving fundamentalist church to which she belongs.
Adultery is condemned as fiercely as homosexuality; and she made some vile public statements about homosexuality being an abomination as she took office.
For she is a senior politician herself.
So it's understandable that many LGBT commentators feel a quiet kind of satisfaction at her downfall.
I feel sorry for her myself, in my usual way. She might as well get some compassion from me, as she will get none from the vile god she worships and serves.
I suppose also I can't help noticing how similar in her way is her case to mine. Like me, he became uncontrollably gripped by a passion she simply could not resist.
Apparently she is in a mental hospital just now. I hope she emerges safely from it: and with a little more humility and compassion.
Labels: the fruits of abomination
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