A mentor told me they didn’t have any serious difficulties with my article, “Searching for the right path” (one of three in my column on August 27), but I could do with a couple corrections. One, he said, is that a doctor or midwife doesn’t ALWAYS know what color blanket, pink or blue, the baby should get. I told my mentor that I had read of hermaphrodites.
So, why didn’t I say, EXCEPT IN RARE CASES? On this matter I should have. I shouldn’t have brushed past anyone, even if there was only one person on the planet who was that way.
If I was a painter I would be described as one who paints with broad strokes, a broad brush. I was a somewhat painter once, got a job from my mother to paint half of the fence in front of her yard. Around Krismos time all young people want a little chum in their pockets, and my mom shared the prize between me and my brother, Charles. Half the fence was given to him, to paint, and half the fence was given to me.
The late Simeon Ebanks, an adopted brother of my dad and his siblings, was a master carpenter, cabinet maker, painter, sometimes electrician, and full-time critic who observed the efforts of every tradesman in his part of the country with the object of putting them in their category. Simeon took one look at me and Charles at work and declared Charles superior, the better painter hands down.
Charles was four years older than I (he still is, ha), and he was better at everything. He still is better than I am on lots of things. We are very close, but we have a major character difference. Simeon observed it while we were painting fence back then, and nothing has changed.
When I jumped out with my half gallon of white paint, I slapped it on. When Charles got to the fence with his white paint, he cleaned it, and then he put on a first coat. Charles is meticulous, very careful about details. People like these make great scientists. I paint with a broad brush. Those who paint with the broad brush have their turf where they want to excel, but in most arenas they can’t see what all the fuss over an A is for.
I should have said, EXCEPT IN RARE CASES. When I looked up hermaphrodite, which is having both male and female sex organs, I landed on a term called intersex. The difference between the two is that an animal that is hermaphrodite is fertile, while a human being that is intersex is usually not. Earthworms are hermaphrodite, and the condition occurs in a few fishes too, sometimes.
Someone named Hilda, on the web page intersexuality.com, wrote that 1.7% of us are intersex, meaning that the doctor or midwife doesn’t know our gender at birth. Hilda said that it is an “erroneous belief that we are an extremely tiny percentage of the population”, and that that “is often used to dismiss our need for legal rights and protections.”
However, the following footnote from The Intersex Society of North America corrected the 1.7% claim by Hilda. The Intersex Society of North America said: “Here’s what we do know: If you ask experts at medical centers how often a child is born so noticeably atypical in terms of genitalia that a specialist in sex differentiation is called in, the number comes out to about 1 in 1500 to 1 in 2000 births. But a lot more people than that are born with subtler forms of sex anatomy variations, some of which won’t show up until later in life.”
As I said, if one person is born that way I should not have run on with my 100% pink blanket, blue blanket story.
My next fault, my mentor said, is that I said that gay men do not sire children. I stand by that one, with an explanation. Yes, I’m going to make a speech here, so I have to beg your patience. I repeat, with a little qualification, that gay men don’t make children. I can’t go into the graphics of the biology here, so let it suffice that for a man to sire a child he has to do something. This something calls for the man to have an attraction for something. Oh, yes, the man could be tricked, maybe blindfolded and that kind of thing. That’s the little qualification.
There’s a group of men who call themselves bisexual, but for such men to express that condition they would have to be promiscuous. You’re not supposed to have everything you want in this life. You don’t have to be a glutton to want to eat more pork chops, and you don’t have to be an alcoholic to want more to drink. Most men want more of what we crave most, or second after food, but our society says, one only. There’s sneaking around. There’s going to a bar for caballeros. Most understand; they don’t expect any blessings for these activities.
Now here comes this group that calls themselves bi-, and we are to bless this CONDITION. We are to give them license to have it both ways. If a man who likes women also has a liking for his own kind, he should suppress the second urge. Yu can’t have both, man. It is flagrant disrespect for a society for a man to crow on a rooftop that he wants both, and on top of that, we are to bless his rights to both.
If you are a man with children, the evidence there is that you have strong feelings for women. You can go to a bar and have a drink and some gab with male friends, just like the rest of us, and just like the rest of us you are to find the right bed to sleep in. We all know about our promiscuity, our lack of monogamy, but we don’t celebrate that until we are at the end of our civilization.
While I’m in this vein I want to point out something to a person of the opposite sex who writes for the Reporter. I’m not eager to comment, because of a bad past experience, but she, Miss M P, seems sincere, and she makes a lot of good points. Look, when I have a fault, or people think I have a fault, or I drift off, I want for them to point it out to me.
I’m not taking the lady to task for anything; I’m just about sharing views on what came to my mind when I read what she wrote. I don’t think anyone should mention gay rights and the rights of Black people in the same breath. Really, the rights of Black people as human beings absolutely should not be mentioned in the same sentence or paragraph with gay men wanting respect for what they do in their closets.
No one ever said that gay men weren’t human beings or that they were of inferior intelligence. The quarrel with gay men is what they do in their beds. All a gay man has to do is shout, “I’m not that way anymore”, and they are welcomed back into society. Gay men trivialize the Middle Passage and 400 years of slavery when they equate distaste for their sexual habits with what was done to our ancestors, and what continues to be done to many of their offspring in some parts of the white world.
Black people don’t only wear their skin in their bedroom: they wear it 24/7. I could be a homosexual and I come and live near you, and you will never know if I don’t want you to know. A homosexual can do that. If I’m black, there ain’t no closet that can hide me from the poison of people who hate the color of my skin.
Gays are to be thanked for the support they have given, in the USA, to help Black people in that country get some rights and respect. Those who choose to crow on the rooftops expose that they have suffered greatly, as individuals, but they don’t understand that the suffering of an individual or a little group is a fly bite compared to the pain of an entire race.
The lady mentioned that it is a fact that men tend to get away with looseness, while women who are into looseness get a harder time. We can wish that were different, but we have to accept that biology forces are at work here.
When it comes to culture, I don’t see any hassle in washing dirty dishes or making my bed and sweeping and mopping the floor. But like hell will I wash clothes on a scrub board or cook. If I lived the life of the “pisote solo” I would perfect my soaking technique and then rinse and hang out the clothes, and I would go back to eating raw vegetables, fruits and nuts, fried eggs, and the can’t-do-without salchichas.
The biology thing makes it impossible on a number of counts to view our sexual conduct the same way. Our biology differences separate the stories of the wayward woman and the wayward man. Culture doesn’t have the capacity to change biology.
I will say, point out, that on the matter of how males interact with males (excluding all those men with all the alphabet categories), a wayward man is not a hero to all men. Men who wish to be wayward, and are restricted, and men who wish to be wayward, and won’t, and men who don’t wish to be wayward, put up with men who are loose. They can be friendly, but they will seldom be confidants.