The Gays

I'm at home eating a Klondike bar. Mmmm....Klondike bar. What would you do for a Klondike bar? Would you go to a dike bar where every night is ladies night?

That's a horrible intro, but I had to bring the conversation 'round to the gays. The lascivious butt-fucking, pussy-eating, rainbow-wearing gays - frequenters of bath houses and HIV clinics. If you turn over the stump in the garden of American culture, you'll find them, destroying wholesome things like marriage, fashion and prime-time television. They're trying to take everything this beautiful country once stood for and spray-paint rainbows all over it. If we let the fags and dikes have their way, soon you'll be able legally marry a horse and have sex with an 8-year-old. They are the dry rot that has set into America's bones, and I, for one, won't stand for it.

Or I wouldn't have stood for it about 6 years ago. The real problem with the gays is that they don't live up to their profile. In person, they're a lot more like people.

I met the gays as a result of playing music. It was my first open mic night at Pengilly's hosted by the intimidating Dan Costello and the immaculate Rebecca Scott, my soul's idol. I hadn't signed up to play. My heart was pattering furiously at the very possibility, when Dan sat down at my table and offered to buy me a shot to calm my nerves. Two shots of Maker's Mark later I was onstage. I played terribly. All the things that I had imagined could go wrong, did. My fingers fumbled every chord, my voice shook, I forgot my lyrics and I almost dropped my guitar.

In spite of all this, the gaggle of excitable ladies in the corner booth waved me over, and Sharon told me that I had an amazing voice and asked if she could buy me a drink. Long story short, she's become one of my best friends. We've traveled together, had a couple run-ins with that tricksy devil, tequila, together. We were even roommates for a few months only to discover that we were disastrously incompatible as roommates.

Sharon always made me feel like I had a gift - even when my fingers fumbled and I dropped my guitar. She has one of those spirits that will never grow tired of art or romance, and she came to me at a point in my life when I desperately needed her. I needed someone who thought that making music mattered. I needed someone who thought that my music mattered.

Sharon created in me a phenomenon that I had only ever read about. Since I've gotten to know her I can't listen to any sermon in which the pastor talks about the sin of homosexuality without wanting to burn down a church.

Gay men and women are people who endure so much cultural hatred, most of which stems from religious sources, that every babygay or closet-case has to overcome their own share of mandatory self-hatred added on to all the regular insecurities of growing up and living.

Gay men and women don't get to hide with all of us normal sinners with our normal sin. They don't get to live their lives and marry their loves and plant their petunias. They get fuckwads like Rick Warren and pious, entitled brats like Carrie Prejean climbing up their asses from now into eternity.

I could give you all of my arguments for why homosexuality is not a sin or a choice, but there is no better proof than experiencing the kind of love and acceptance that the church claimed to offer in the very place the church condemned.

I love you, Sharon.

-KL