Dating : There was once a time . . .

There was once a time,
and it still exists
many places,
where
whether you were
gay or straight
was a most serious,
maybe even THE
most serious question
you could be asked
and/or
have to answer.

Straight people can self-replicate
with one another.
Isn’t that about
the biggest difference
between
gay and straight people,
that ability to
biologically
produce a new
generation to replace yourselves?
And if you decide
selfishly or otherwise
(as in for some other reason)
that you don’t want to
make babies
and that the meaning
of your life
isn’t tied to
making a new
mini-you version of yourself,
that doesn’t make you gay,
but it makes you the same
as a gay person
in at least that way.
I remember when I was
maybe 25,
drunk, walking towards
my vehicle to drive home
(drunk) ,
thinking for some reason,
“I sure hope I’m not
a communist
or a queer.”
Why I considered this as
an important thing
to focus upon at that moment,
I have no fuckin’ idea.
Many years later
I’d facetiously tell anyone who’d listen
“Just so long as Tom and Katy stay together
and the queers can’t marry,
I know we’ll all be okay.”
And this I said because
each of those things was
equally irrelevant to how and whether
we’d all be okay or not.

Gay or Straight is
becoming an utterly
meaningless distinction.
Evolution, which is not a
“theory” but a fact
is in its essence
nothing more
and nothing less than
the way life unfolds
within us, without us,
always and forever.
And I’ve learned that there is nothing,
NOTHING,
that will make us okay or
more powerful than our ability,
gay or straight,
to love one another and life itself
as fully as we can manage.

*********************************

Most all of my books can be found on Amazon, of course, and some at other places like Latahbooks.com, a smaller press in Spokane WA. my adopted hometown, or at the web page of HarperCollins.com, a much larger press in NYC which is NOT my hometown but which is (or at least used to be) a very fun, cool place to visit and go eat at pricey restaurants on the dimes of editors who became friends. But I digress —

Just go buy my books please or at least follow me here on Medium and make me yer fav. poet, b/c let’s be honest, I’m a hell of a lot easier to understand than Jon Milton and that whole Paradise Lost thing, right?

Thanks to Christine Stevens at True Confessional for posting a version of this poem before, Gay/Straight. A brief sermon, hopefully worth your… | by Terry Trueman | True Confessional | Jan, 2021 | Medium

Wikipedia & Encyclopedia

Terry Trueman (born December 15, 1947) is a Printz Award-winning author of young adult fiction, with his best known… en.wikipedia.org

http://www.encyclopedia.com/children/scholarly-magazines/trueman-terry-1947