Tag Archives: Homosexuality

Reading Words of Love

My neighbour Dirk Tanghe is a passionate man.  He lives life big.  And he has big books, like this one:

Oscar Wilde was a playwright in the 1800s.  He loved a young man named Bosie who was 16 years younger.  He was imprisoned for this illicit bond.  Two Loves reveals letters that Oscar wrote to Bosie.  Let the words speak.  Let Oscar’s soul touch ours.

Leave behind any thoughts about homosexuality, about age, about “appropriateness”.  This is universal.

Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses.

You are the divine thing I want, the thing of grace and genius.

[Love] repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him.

Be happy to have filled with an immortal love the soul of a man who now weeps in hell, and yet carries heaven in his heart.  I love you, I love you, my heart is a rose which your love has brought to bloom.  My life is a desert fanned by the delicious breeze of your breath, and whose cool springs are your eyes.

Love me always, love me always.  You have been the supreme, the perfect love of my life.  There can be no other.

O sweetest of all boys, most loved of all loves, my soul clings to your soul, my life is your life, and in all the worlds of pain and pleasure you are my ideal of admiration and joy.

A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one’s heart is hard, not a day on which one’s heart is happy.

I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you … you can really recreate in me that energy and sense of joyous power on which art depends.

All of Us

Tonight I’m going to see the musical Prom Queen, about a fellow who wanted to invite his boyfriend to his high school prom.  The school board said no and so began a legal battle.  Eventually Marc and Jason got to go.

The raindrops fall on everyone, equally
The candle casts its glow on each person in the room
Death, in its own time, comes to both you and me
All worthy in this world
All precious in the sight of Spirit
No one left out

And now it’s afterwards.  I’ve just stood in awe of forty teenagers giving their all on the stage … joyous smiles and wild dancing all the way to bowed heads and anguish.  It was a celebration of courage, determination, the deepest of loves and the human family.  All together now.

The songs and the lyrics flowed through me and no doubt helped many of us with our own lives:

We could be something infinite
Or we could be nothing at all
Please let us choose the infinity of our uniqueness

You haven’t heard the last of us
We will not be stopped from doing the good that the world needs

Put your game face on
So no one can see who you really are

Homosexuality is an abomination
As we carve out humanity into us and them

At one point, Marc, a future astronomer, gazes out at the night sky and sees up there three people he loves: his best friend Carly, his mom and his dad, all of them standing on the stage.  Carly and mom’s stars are close but dad’s is so far away, barely visible, as he mourns his son’s gay life.  The scene went right through me.

Later mom prays to Mary:

From the depths of my confusion, my despair
Mother Mary, Mother Mary … hear my prayer

Show this mother, Mother Mary, how to love
Both my precious only child and the Holy Lord above
Oh, the tearing out of the heart as loves and duty both call

***

Here was the agony and ecstasy of being human
Laid out on the stage of the Grand Theatre
In the persons of many young people
Representing us all