Flags At Halfmast

It is Tuesday afternoon after the shootings, and I cannot seem, as they say, to move on.  I am supposed to be tolerant, but it does not escape me that Muslims are acculturated by their religious  upbringing to hate gay persons and no doubt delight in their killing.  I am not trying to express a special prejudice against Muslims. All the Abrahamic religions have formally indicted homosexuality. There is hateful prejudice everywhere; I think back to the Holocaust and the pronouncements of  various leaders of the Church railing against the Jews and calling for their extermination, and as the evidence shows the extravagant glee with which Catholics brought out their machine guns and mowed the Jews down. (My lurid imaginings keep seeing the inside of that club in Orlando as a kind of concentration camp extermination site.) Right here in our condo a very pious Episcopalian who read my memoir of growing up gay wrote a review for Amazon excoriating the book, its author, and railing against its contents (her comments have recently been seconded by another reviewer who has left a detailed letter on the Amazon site branding me and my evil ways).  She even once wrote my husband an email suggesting that it was only consulting the Bible that she felt that she could continue to know him.  I remember once traveling in Turkey with Richard and a store owner asked if we were cousins, persisting in the face of my various evasions, until the truth dawned on him as I realized from the hard, poisonous look of hatred that contorted his features.  Yet I have traveled in Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco, and in each place I have met males who in their sweetness of spirit always astounded me who am habituated to the much harsher more "masculine" Clint Eastwood behaviors of American men.  Masculine sweetness seemed to be the mode in those Arab countries twenty or thirty years ago.  I remember two Moroccan soldiers wanting to show me some tower in Rabat, and each one taking one of my hands and we walked along hand in hand for blocks on end.  But I also remember a young man with whom I dined one evening in Tangier in 1970, I as the host for him and his wife, and he had been showing me around the city in the morning, culminating in a visit to the archaic but still functioning public baths where he engaged a private room where we had sex for a couple of hours. On that trip I met a great number of males who were very much available and in my judgement fundamentally heterosexual.  Years ago before "gay" became a commonplace term in the USA I often had relations with males here in America who were clearly not committed nor on the other hand averse to libidinous contact with another male.  A man's masculinity was not at stake when he found himself naked in bed with another man.  How sad it is to see such fear and anger culminating in murderous rage.  I am old now, no longer an object of suspicion, fear, and hostility; I do not represent an invitation nor a rejection. I mourn for all those young men cut down.  What will the murderer's child have to think about when he grows up to learn his grandfather's rationale for his father and to realize his part in this enormity?  Yes, so much fear and self-hatred pollute our atmosphere today.