Letters to the Editor
Out in the Mountains welcomes your letters. Although we will withhold names from printing upon request, the letter must be accompanied by a verifiable name and address in order to be considered for publication. We try to print every letter we receive, but reserve the right to edit for space and clarity. Letters are also subject to the editorial policy stated in the masthead.
Kudos I
I have been an avid reader of Out in the Mountains for many years now. Never before have I felt like I wanted to be so active in our community.
I enjoyed reading last month’s paper and loved the changes to nearly everything. I feel the paper now has depth and caring that I haven’t witnessed in the past. Not to say that past editors haven’t done a good job, not at all, they have done an exceptional job. I, as a reader, love the variety that each editor brings to OITM.
As a writer, I can tell that there is a new direction that this is heading in – one of feeling and caring. I think those two variables are often missed in a gay society where we are often competing with one another.
So, I applaud your changes and hope the rest of the community will agree that there is a fresh new wave of talent just around the bend, and we are lucky to have Jason Whipple as Editor-in-chief of our primary newspaper.
On another note, I just wanted to tell you that, in a fit of cabin-fever, my friend Matthew and I went up to Richmond to help with the monthly stuffing festivities and had a blast. It takes a lot to get us going, but Bennett Law proved to be up to the task. Thank you Bennett for making us laugh heartily.
To the readers, I just want to tell you that this twenty-something will be going back for more, and you should really consider getting up to Richmond for a stuffing party because not only do you leave with a sense of Pride, but with a renewed sense of humor. You guys are great up there. Keep up the excellence.
Nicholas T. Bania
Randolph, VT
*****
Kudos II
Naked Curiosity is fucking amazing! I have been so secret about all the wild action that gets me off, but I’ve started telling some of my friends and they have been great about it.
Your editorals have been great, too. You and the writer of Naked Curiosity oughtta be boyfriends. Keep it up.
John
From the Editor: Thank you, Nicholas and John. I was once told that this was a thankless job, but that has not been my experience so far. At times, it does feel as if I am working in a vaccuum, but I appreciate being reminded that people do indeed read Out in the Mountains
As for the boyfriend comment, John, you’ll see from Dennis’s column this month that he is happily married to his partner, Martin. And at this point in production while writing this, Bradley will be home in seven days.
Yet, circumstances aside, Dennis and I have certainly had our share of flirtatious fun on certain Sunday mornings.
*****
The Not-So-Kudos
I cannot believe that your newspaper devotes so much time and energy to promote an abnormal, deviant lifestyle when we have so many dire needs and important issues facing the country today…. It totally amazes me and others that homosexuality is considered such an important issue….
Frank
*****
Correction
In the April issue of OITM, Anya Raven Hunter presented an eloquent article called Living the Questions. The chakra graphic we used, unfortunately, did not line up with the text that Anya presented. We apologize to Anya, and to any readers who were confused by our error.
*****
Response to David Garrecht
[Rutland Herald, "Letters" April 2, 2001]
Contradicting a Herald Editorial of March 12 that argued: “…there is the myth that homosexuality can be ‘cured,’ there is absolutely no reliable scientific evidence to that effect…,” David Garrecht replied, “…there is considerable evidence that very many people have successfully left the homosexual lifestyle. …In Vermont, the place to start is by visiting the website. …Vermont deserves uncensored dialogue on this issue.”
My response is that on the Internet you can probably find any conceivable view of the cause for adopting or not adopting a homosexual lifestyle. The question is: Is the view scientifically “reliable” or is it based not on science but on wishful thinking?
As a married homosexual well along in years (I’ll be ninety in two month), I have the belief that both practicing homosexuals and orthodox born-again Christians, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Hindus oversimplify an issue that requires a guarded hypothesis rather than doctrinaire absolutism.
Homosexuals point to DNA as proof that they have no control over their lifestyle, ignoring that a child seduced at an early age may find the experience so overpowering that by conditioned reflex rather than DNA, he can never free himself from his homosexuality, even though, by later conditioned reflex he may learn to love women and become a husband and father.
DNA is programmed in the genes; conditioned reflex is equally irresistible but by chance. If I had been seduced by a girl cousin at age six, I could have been programmed (i.e., “conditioned”) heterosexual.
If at first my homo/hetero double harness may seem self-destructive, it is no more divisive than the stresses and strains between hetero husband and wife that lead to high divorce rate.
All over the world – in England, Turkey, India, Siam, Japan, wherever I have traveled, I have encountered men who have eagerly embraced the opportunity to have sex with a homosexual, but afterward resorted to the rationalization that they themselves are heterosexual.
I believe that my seduction at six was not ordained by my genes but was an accident of circumstance. I can never forget the incident. Wakened at midnight in the double bed at my grandfather’s, when after the event, the teen-age boy, satisfied, placed his hand over my lips: “Don’t you tell Gram.”
I replied, “When can we do it again?”
I was a good boy, conscientious, cautious, but I considered myself an absolute homosexual until by nearly involuntary experiences I learned that women were attracted to me, and I could learn to love women. If I had kept my mouth shut, shielded by wife and children, I could have passed as what the community called “normal.” But I was a writer who found my life too absorbing not to describe it in poetry and fiction, and that meant, unless I became a closet writer, I must go public.
Like thousands of gays and lesbians, I have taken considerable punishment. I am an author of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism, and have sometimes discovered that a gay magazine will reject a story because I am straight and a straight magazine will reject the same story because I am gay.
Thirty years ago Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series printed my brief sexual/literary autobiography. When they asked for more information, I wrote that I was bisexual, coining a musical metaphor that I had been accused of playing the piano like an organist, and playing the organ like a pianist. In their next issue, they published my script, but later left me out of their next issue. Twenty years later under a new format, they invited me to write a forty-page literary autobiography, and I submitted a homo/hetero “Welcome O Life!” which appeared in 1996 with biographies of 19 other authors in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series No. 24.
I have become an apologist and crusader for an ambiguous lifestyle but also I am a professional lyric writer who takes his craft seriously. I am also a secular humanist believing that worldwide civil wars growing out of rivalry between contesting religious faiths and nations competing for money and power will conceivably bring an end to human domination over this infinitesimal planet out at the edge of the cosmos.
For the past ten years in the initiative of Marquis Who’s Who I have been included in …In America and …In the World. On their initiative also I was invited to submit “Thoughts on Life” which for several years appeared as a postscript in both volumes and still appears in Who’s Who in America: “Our social, religious, and political institutions are medieval, and obsoletely inconsistent with our knowledge of the physical and biological universe. Unless we rid ourselves of nationalism, militarism and economic imperialism and the notion of an anthropomorphic universe, we are doomed to self-destruction.”
Lyle Glazier
Bennington, VT