Bear with me as I build on some random thoughts that have been brewing in my noggin for some time now.  Recently there was an article in Salt Lake City’s City Weekly newspaper about the transgender Latino community in SLC.  You can read that here.  One City Weekly reader, himself gay, left them a voice mail stating:

“I’m a gay male in Salt Lake City—a respectable gay male—and this is disgraceful. We don’t need the public to look at this and feel that this is the type of trash that I represent. This is not me, I hate it, this is filth. These people that are doing this type of filth—you know, I like drag queens, but this is filth—they should go back to their country, and that’s just the way it is." 

Wow!  Racism, nationalism and gay snobbery all rolled into one.  Amazing!

Now we cut over to a discussion that began over an article in the Salt Lake Tribune comparing the Twilight series to Mormonism.  Not a new subject to me as I’ve read other such comments though this article I thought rated a big fat FAIL as the arguments seemed generic to religion in general to me, but the brewing thoughts were more over a friends comment about not reading the books and that she had done the “fitting in with the crowd” thing as a kid. 

These things along with so many other things are all fitting into a larger picture in my head.  My friend also commented that “Religion is about rules and telling people what to think, how to live, what to wear, etc.”   That, coupled with the “fitting in” comment set my brain to twirling even more.  Those two things, fitting in and religion, seem to go hand in hand in my view.  They are both about control but who and what are we really trying to control?  And Why?  I think it’s time we all took a good long hard look at these questions.

The other night on TV I heard a brief snippet of someone commenting to another that the fact that they were gay was going to have to come out sooner or later and someone wasn’t going to approve.  I have no idea what the show was as I was in another room and not watching it. 

I believe that the world is moving towards more of a “oneness”.  That there will one day be a world government and I view that as a potentially good thing.  Yet I wonder, even then, will all these fear based prejudices and constant comparisons with each other ever come to an end?  Why do we feel the need to “fit in” with any other person or community?  Why are we all so afraid of who we really are individually and collectively?  It is my personal believe that we ARE the divine and the divine is all of us.  We are all connected.  To each other and everything around us.  It’s all energy and it all has the same source although we call it by many names.

Religions are man made as a means of controlling the masses and if that weren’t enough, we do it to ourselves with our constant comparing with each other as if we, by ourselves, are not good enough or worthy enough unless we can feel superior to another.  Last night my Tantra group watched the 1997 movie Bliss with Terence Stamp.  Excellent movie.  In the movie, Terence Stamp plays Baltazar, a sex therapist that teaches the main character, Joseph (Craig Sheffer), about tantric sex to help save his marriage.  In one scene Baltazar shows Joseph his patient books, one after another of women who do all these things like liposuction, eating disorders, plastic surgeries, etc, in order to make themselves “perfect” instead of just accepting that who they are is already perfect and beautiful.  Hence the needed therapy.

Will, a commenter on the City Weekly piece about the voice mail stated it very nicely:

“I am aghast. This mentality of "let me in, but noone else" is exactly what has limited the previous human rights movements. The suffrage effort was about more than allowing women to be just like white men. Affirmative action and other products of the civil rights movement were not meant to transform minority population into masculine caucasian clones! the queer rights movement is supposed to be the moment where we recognize that it is not our assimilation that gives us our worth, but our uniqueness! Snaps to Dark for highlighting two latino men who are doing what they can for their community. Slaps to "respectable gay males" in Salt Lake who are no better than their "respectable" Utah ancestors.”

This is my point:  “the moment where we recognize that it is not our assimilation that gives us our worth, but our uniqueness!”

Wake up people and smell the coffee!  Accept that we are all unique just as we should be and that IT IS GOOD!  No, we are not that filth and neither are “they”. We are all beautifully who we are meant to be despite our efforts to hide from it.

Okay, off my soap box now.  If you read all the way through that rant then kudo’s and I hope it didn’t ramble too much.