The gay agenda. Is there a gay agenda? The right wing thinks so. Perhaps since I am so out of the loop in gay culture I didn’t get my copy of the gay agenda and I can’t seem to be able to find a pdf online. I think there is a gay agenda though. The agenda is to teach in schools, that being gay is alright. It’s ok to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered (LGBT). That’s a long way from where schooling was when I was coming of age.

The way I was taught was what was being taught for a couple of centuries. It was extremely difficult for me at least. I had to learn to live a double life from about the age of 14. I only attempted to have a girlfriend (of the female gender) twice. One time was a girl named Donna Rinaldi. I went to grammar school with her and in my last year of school we went out, which meant we were boyfriend and girlfriend. We both liked each other very much, we loved pop music and had similar senses of humor.

Donna lived on the other side of town in Lodi, much closer to school. After the graduation parties petered out after a week or two I mainly stayed in my part of Lodi while Donna was in hers. I never really made much of an effort to go over to Massey Street and hang out. There was absolute zero sexual attraction. Not so soon after not really seeing each other we broke up over the phone. No distraught feelings involved, at least not for me.

I hadn’t hit puberty yet but I think on a primal level I knew I wasn’t going to be playing on Donna’s team. I last saw Donna a few years later. She was working at a Mini Mart in a Saddle Brook strip mall. I shopped there and we chatted. I wound up telling her a whole bunch of lies about my life for some reason and when I sat in my car I felt terrible. Terrible enough to go back in the store and confess that everything I had just told her was false. Whether or not it mattered to her, I don’t know, but I at least gave her something to talk about.

The other time I ‘went out’ with a woman was with a girl from around the block in Lodi that I also worked with at a book company warehouse. I had known Terri throughout my childhood and we hung out once or twice. It seemed to make sense to ask her out to a movie. I picked out the movie. Reds. Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson and the Russian Revolution. It was three hours long. That was the night I realized that going to a movie for a date was superb.

You sit next to each other but you don’t talk and you don’t look at each other. So for 90 minutes or 2 maybe, 3 hours it’s perfect. Technically you’re a couple and you’re at the stage that recurs later in a relationship where you don’t talk and you don’t look at each other. I think the movie exhausted Terri and after a light snack at a diner, I drove her home where Terri, noticing my hesitancy on what to do next, leaned over and gave me a peck on the cheek. Nice but I felt nothing. Terri was a bit of a tomboy when we were growing up and I wouldn’t be surprised if she were a lesbian now.

So those two experiences were mainly stemming from peer pressure, more so in the summer of 1976. In 1981, it was less so, but I was still in the closet and subject to the perceptions of my peers. Putting up a front, then running around later on in crazy situations. A little bit of a Blue Velvet vibe, which for me is all about how things are very different right under the surface. Things would have definitely been different if I had the support that exists out there, mainly online.

I had a Catholic education and the subject of sex or sexuality was never taught. In fact in high school sex and sexuality was all the talk of the hallways but never properly discussed by the faculty. I went to an all boys Catholic high school, and out of 200 boys, I’d say there were only 3 other gay students. And we didn’t flock together at all. We were chameleons.

The percentage might be higher as I’m only thinking of the fey students that I went to Paramus Catholic Boys High School with. Nothing sexual happened to me there though there were one or two teachers that I had pined for. Lay teachers, not any of the clergy. A bit swish for my tastes, the robed Brothers were. I did run into a school administrator in my last year at a certain cruising spot. Nothing happened. It was a heart stopper for the both of us. All that was missing was Larry Craig, but he may have been stalling.

So the gay agenda is more about support, letting a kid know it’s ok to be who they may be. Is it a losing battle? A lot of the opponents speaking of the gay agenda as if they wrote it, (ala The Protocols of Zion), get their information mainly from a book written by a group of people living in the desert thousands of years ago. That is their source, a book that was edited and reedited over and over. They don’t think about editing and who really does? When you’re reading a book, you don’t necessarily say, ‘What a good editor’, though unless you’re in the publishing world you might.

Just something that I was compelled to write. This is the second post of the night. The first post follows.

I just took this a few minutes ago