Looking Back Over The Years

We watched "Philadelphia" last night, the film where the Tom Hanks character, a rising young lawyer, is infected with AIDS, fired by his prestigious law firm, sues, is defended in court by the Denzel Washington character, an obscure young lawyer willing to take the case with all its unpopular connotations who wins the case through making the jury work through their prejudice to the moral truth.  It took both me and my husband back to another era; he lived in New York then, a young gay male, watching his circle diminished by the disease while the government did nothing, and the public at large displayed their indifference along with their contempt; I, on the other hand, was a married man with four children whose sexual life in those days was pretty much confined to a series of males who would be considered very safe partners, because they were straight males trying something different in another kind of relationship.  Prior to the AIDS epidemic gays were more or  less hidden; the irony of the epidemic was that it opened up for inspection the gay world, when sons came back to Podunk City from New York or San Francisco to die in their childhood beds.  If they were lucky, that is, and their parents took them in.  So AIDS ironically made gay males acceptable, through the always sympathetic spectacle of young men dying.  "Philadelphia" is a real tear-jerker, a feel good movie that skirts the undying hatred of many families, the inherent suspicion of gays by straights, the unyielding hatred of so many Christian churches, all this is pretty much left to the side.  But in real life we two know so many gay males who were lucky or careful enough to survive who are now in their later years so damaged by a lifetime of repression, victims of the national hatred of gays, and the church.  We know so many men whose emotional lives are limited to furtive encounters that can never be revealed, of men shunned by their families, not invited to the family gatherings, men who cannot step out of the shadows and try for normal relationships because of the fear and instinctive repression that a life in the closet has given them, denatured, emotionally crippled, often successful professionals, but barren and empty old queens underneath it all.  Looming over it all are so many branches of the Christian Church not to mention the Jews and the Muslims (why my heart sinks at the thought of Muslim refugees!) who work their insidious damage before a youngster has even thought of sex, and as the Jesuits always say "get them young and you have them for life."  Since the most ardent of our religious public seem also to be devoted to the presidency of Donald Trump we will be interested to see how they reconcile narrow faith, strong prejudice, intolerance toward gays, with a First Lady who in her earlier modeling days walked the runways naked except for high heels.  I can't quite see Eleanor Roosevelt in that guise.