i'm having one of those lower case days where i can't be bothered hitting the shift key on the keyboard. you see i'm trying to quit smoking. i only made up my mind a half hour ago to drop the habit while cycling down to the shops in brunswick i thought i was going to have a heart attack. heart beating like a mad fucker and all i could think was - is this the last thing i am going to see? fuck needed to use the shift to type that question mark. but that's not the only thing i guess. it's been a stressful week, nightmarish temper tandrums from a housemate that almost led to violence almost led me to the point of leaving, a social life that has crawled to well a crawl, and not to mention a job that is uncertain because of budget cuts. yeah feeling pretty lowercase.

tasmania

When I told my mum I was gay her first response was of love and reassurance, her second was that she didn't understand and was concerned about my future, and lastly that if I didn't mind terribly much she wouldn't tell the rest of the family. It is this third comment that has resurfaced in conversation time and time again. The fear and shame that the moral disapprobation from her conservative Christian family would be "all be a bit too much of a bother."

Her recently widowed sister and her female friend have been staying with my mum this week and out of some obligation I headed out to her place today to say "howdy." They laughed at this as I entered the room and after introductions my aunt and her friend returned to their card game and my mum to her British crime drama. I sat down and pulled from my bag, a book that my friend had lent me yesterday called Coming Out from Within and from what I can gather it is a spiritual approach to understanding and dealing with grief and loss faced by gay men and lesbians (from coming out, homophobia and death). As my mum drove me to the train station I realised it wasn't in my bag, I'd left it on the couch in her living room.

It hurts that my mum is so worried what her family will think about her. That she is deep down (not so deep) really ashamed that her son is gay and it is a fact she feels she needs to hide from them. For a moment there I actually considered not telling her and let the fates decide whether her sister found the book or not. However this thought was a brief one. Embarrassing my mum like that would do neither of us any good and so I offered her a choice: if you don't want my aunt to know that I'm gay then you'll need to hide the book. I'll pick it up next weekend.

I hope she reads it instead.

The Forever War

I stumbled across some notes I'd scribbled down a few months ago after finishing Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. The novel is something of a sci-fi classic, less for its science or its story but its anti-war basis, which is largely attributed to the author's experiences in the Vietnam War. The book is diametrically opposite to the psuedo-fascist musings of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers (which it is often compared to) written at the end of the 1950s. What I noticed, quite unexpectantly however, running beside this anti-war theme was a somthing of homo subtone, which was largely ignored in my edition's introduction.

When William Mandella, the book's main character returns to Earth after a disastrous campaign agaist the Tauran enemy outside our solar system he finds a changed world. Relativistic physics means that weeks maybe months have past for Mandella but back on Earth it has been decades since he left. Earth is now a violent and impoverished planet where the global currency is based on calories. To combat an unsustainable population, the global government has introduced what are termed homosex policies. Homosexual relationships aren't now so much as tolerated but encouraged.

Mandella tracks down his mother, now elderly living with a female friend, her lover and partner after the death of his father. It is something he struggles hard to come to terms with. Back in the 1970s, he says, before leaving for the war there was a growing acceptability of the homosexual lifestyle. It was something he generally agreed with but to find his mother living with a woman: this is something different. Uncomfortable with his mother's life choices, Mandella flees to the country to find his fellow soldier and lover, Marygay Potter.

As relativistic time throws Mandella further into a distant future, he finds himself commanding an entire strike force of homosexuals. Centuries in the future homosexuality is now considered the norm, throwing his hetero-normative world upside down. Children are born in vats and heterosexuality is seen as something medically disfunctional; children who are found exhibiting these tendencies are "reeducated" early. This leads Mandella worry that his sexual orientation, his pathological attraction to women will undermine his command.

I am in two minds about this, either this is an early attempt to demontrate difficulties experienced by gay people in everyday life or it is simply an exploitative vision of the future where tolerance has led to a nightmarish disfunctional world. I prefer to believe the former although Haldeman does cop out at the end when Charlie, a sypathetically portrayed gay man chooses to be medically transformed straight. Oh well.