Sunday, January 1, 2012   The new year begins with old thoughts
provoked by one of Paul's letters in the New Testament. I quote
from notes I made in the late 1990's while thinking about my
brother John, his homosexuality, and my own homophobia:
 Following Paul's lead, conditioned by his biases and the
prejudices of a Christian nation, our parents helped pass along,
or allowed to be passed along, part and parcel with their
conservative stability, a subtle racism. I had to confront this
again a few weeks ago, waiting at a streetlight. Around the
corner came a car with a black male driver and a white female
passenger sitting intimately close to him. My stomach turned. A
bowl of nuts for the holiday season: hazelnuts, peanuts,
walnuts, pistachios, pecans, and nigger toes. That’s what I grew
up calling them. Standing next to the east goal post of the
football field at Hermosa Jr. High, a fellow seventh-grader
gleefully and perhaps maliciously informed me there were
creatures in the world called “homaphrodites.”