God "knocked for six" by Vatican decision to shut down Limbo - Heaven braces for huge soul influx

God is said to have been completely "bowled over" by the Vatican's announcement yesterday that it is to shut down Limbo. Sources close to the supreme being say that he had no foreknowledge of the decision which is believed to have sent shockwaves through the Heavens.

The Vatican has not offered any explanation as to why it has decided to close Limbo after 700 years. Opened in the early 1300s as an eternal holding place for unbaptized babies, it is thought to currently hold more than 1300 trillion gazillion willion souls and the Vatican has offered no clues as to where it plans to relocate them.
Rumours have circulated in recent year about Heaven becoming increasingly cramped, although these have been hard to substantiate due to the notorious difficuties involved in obtaining unbiased reports from the heavenly realms - the only people considered to be capable of achieving reports of a non-partisan nature, so-called "media", are not deemed to be creditable news sources.
If the rumours are indeed true, the fate of the Limbo souls would appear to hang in the balance. Asking to remain anonymous, an angel told us, "we really don't know where they're going to go. Clearly they can't be placed in temporary accommodation outside the "gates" because then they might as well just stay where they are. But Heaven already has an influx of hundreds of thousands of souls every day and we really don't know how we can just suddenly take in such a large number of souls."
There has been speculation that the Vatican's latest announcements on homosexuality are part of a concerted effort to reduce the numbers of souls entering Heaven. With so called LGBTs having to endure less oppression and rejection in many of today's modern societies, the number of homosexual souls entering Heaven in the last 20 or so years has shot up. Previously, such people, tormented by guilt and self-loathing, tended not to lead productive or happy lives and so ended up burning in Hell.

With the change in attitude towards them that has swept through much of western society, homosexuals have begun to live increasingly happy and fulfilling lives and so on dying they have been entering into Heaven in increasingly large numbers. Being a homosexual is not apparently a bar from entering Heaven or joining the US military, although the Vatican has just announced that gays will not be allowed to enter Catholic semenaries. It is not known if there is any relation betweeen the dwindling number of catholic seminarians and the increasingly large number of visible, happy and well-adjusted gays in secular life. There have been rumours of a gay "sub-culture" in Catholic seminaries but there could be no listing found for such in the popular gay venue guide Spartacus, usually a reliable source on such things. God is not believed to be worried about a gay subculture in Heaven.

It is thought the Vatican hopes that by discriminating against and oppressing homosexuals
more actively, it will cause them to return to their formerly unhappy ways of life and thus disbar themselves from entry into Heaven.

Outrage has been expressed at the Vatican's alleged plans to examine the Limbo souls for pre-natal homosexual tendencies. It is thought that any souls identified with such inclinations will be sent to burn in Hell in order to reduce the final number of souls that will be relocated to the next life and thus ease the strain at the "pearly gates". Arguments that such pre-natal tendencies, or post- for that matter, could only be considered to have been fleeting, given the short earthly life of the souls in question, appear not to have been taken into account by the Vatican council dealing with the issue. Their cyclical on homosexuality, however, does draw a distinction between "transitory" inclinations and what it calls "deep-seated" ones.


Another outcome of the Vatican decision thought to be exercising God's mind is the question of what to do with the thousands of angels who have been staffing Limbo since it opened over 7 centuries ago. One such angel reacted less than serenely to the news, saying: "it's alright for them. They're not in the least affected by the decisions they make but what the f#*! am I gonna do now? It's been hundreds of years since I was up there. It's gonna take me ages to readjust!"

There is little hope that the Vatican will backtrack on its decision, such a move normally taking centuries and usually being preceded by a long drawn out process in which the decision eventually becomes dogma and a tenet of the Catholic faith before it can be summarily discarded by a sitting pope.

God is not thought be considering sending a representative to earth to negotiate with the Vatican. The Lord is known only to have once sent a representative to earth, his white son, Jesus, just over 2 millenia ago. That visit ironically resulted in the founding of the Roman Catholic church and the Vatican. It is thought that God now believes that he was rash in sending his son and didn't think through the consequences of his action enough.

With these latest events, God has opened himself up to the charge of "taking his eye off the ball". There has been some criticism of him for spending too much time talking on the phone to US president George W. Bush. The 43rd president of the United States is on record as saying that God calls him for personal chats.

Higher Rates of Substance Abuse in LGBT Community?

In my last post I stated that there is a far higher instance of substance abuse among gays than among heterosexuals. A friend of mine who works in the area of recovery often quotes me a pretty staggering statistic: that the instance of alcoholism and drug addiction is 30% in the gay community while only 3% in the community at large! To me it was a claim that seemed to be borne out by what I could see around me. I pretty much gave up going out on the scene 3 years ago because of the incredibly high drug consumption here in BCN. The last straw came when I was in a club and could smell the pungent and intoxicating whiff of cocaine in the air!

Let me state here that of course it takes somebody who`s used coke to be able to smell it. I was never a habitual user and I haven`t touched any drug (not even poppers, which I never liked anyway) since August 2002.

Anyway, I went googling for some stats today and the stats I found supporting my friend`s claim were all from research done in the late 70s and early 80s. I took issue with Andrew Sullivan in my last post for arguing that gays have shaken off the emotional trauma and the inner conflicts that dogged our modern gay forefathers. But a 2004 report on Social Exclusion and its effects amongst the gay community by the British organisation, Gay Men`s Health Networkwould appear to offer some support for his argument, citing as itdoes recent studies showing that gay men are in fact no more prone to alcohol abuse and addiction than their heterosexual peers. Interestingly, it doesn`t say the same for lesbian women, who, according to this report, are higher consumers of alcohol than their heterosexual counterparts and prone to more mental health problems even when they consume less than straight women!

There still remains, however, the issue of HIV infection. I recently attended a sexual health workshop for gay men and they gave me an interesting stat: for every 1,000 men a het woman sleeps with, 3 of them will be infected with HIV. For every 1,000 men a man sleeps with, 270 of them will be infected with HIV and as many as 50 of them will be unaware of their positive status.

Sullivan stated that in San Francisco HIV infection was down on last year. It would be interesting to know what the figures are countrywide. I know that over here, at least in Spain, infection rates are on the up. When you add to that fact the surely not unrelated rise in popularity of barebacking, and the less frequent but to me much more disturbing subculture of "conversion" ceremonies, can we really be celebrating progress in our community? Or maybe that`s not the right word to use. The gay "community" is a thing of the past, apparently, because we`ve all done such a good job of getting breeders to accept us.

The End of Gay Couture

Gay Republican Andrew Sullivan has written an interesting article for The New Republic magazine and posted it on his blog. Entitled The End of Gay Culture & The Future of Gay Life, it celebrates the increasing openness of society to gays and lesbians and the waning of monolithic gay culture as a result.

I have a lot of time for Andrew Sullivan. Back in Dublin I always read his columns on US politics in the News Review section of the Sunday Times. He was an open gay republican way back when to be such was to expose yourself to despisement both from fellow gays and fellow republicans. The fact that this is no longer the case is indeed proof for the case he makes in this article. However, I am not as optimistic as him in drawing my conclusions.

I agree with a lot of what the article says as it simply chronicles developments that are plain to the eye: "gayness" has been assimilated into western culture at a remarkable pace over the last 15 to 20 years. This is the age of the ubermedia. Their power to influence us and set agenda is unquestionable. If earlier generations grew up having "gay" represented to them by John Inman`s camp character in Are You Being Served, today`s young gay people are spoiled for choice when it comes to gay representation on TV. Shows are now built around 1 or more than 1 gay character or person;. Hollywood`s frequent high-school movies have at least one stock gay adolescent, and reality shows have shown how openly gay people can win the hearts of a viewing nation - a stark contrast to times when closeted gay people in the public eye won the people`s affirmation only to have it coldly rescinded when their sexuality was salaciously leaked by capricious media. Back then the public would righteously nurse its sense of disgust and betrayal while at the same time feeling vindicated in its belief that all homosexuals were devious.

The new fondness of the media for us gays, I think, has its origins in another happy development: the modern family`s ability to embrace (or at least to come to some sorts of terms with) a son or daughter`s homosexuality. Coming out to parents these days, thankfully, is more likely to produce sadness about not having grandchildren, anxious wondering about what one as a parent did wrong, or, more happily, simple acceptance. Even the most religious of parents manage to produce the words "you`re still our son/daughter and we love you". Banishment and disinheritance are very much untypical reactions these days, although of course they still do happen.

As Sullivan points out, society seems very much to have come to terms with homosexuality and now we homos must be brave and be prepared for the consequences and responsibilites that come with this acceptance.

What I take exception to in Sullivan`s article is its failure to take stock of the extent to which we are indebted and beholden to "heterosexual" society for the freedoms we now enjoy. Sullivan doesn`t seem to consider as serious the still fraught coming out process that gay people still go through. In an update he cites as support for his argument a mail from a 20 year old American undergrad who tells him how much support he`s gotten from his straight friends, how little prejudice and rejection he`s experienced, and how irrelevant to his life are those older generations of gay men that went before him. Yet both the author of the letter and its recipient are blithely unaware of the pained psychological process this kid would seem to profess to have gone through in coming out to himself. Sullivan talks up the great number of gay role models that exist for young people coming of age today and the increasingly faceted lifestyles that a young gay person can adopt. Yet this 20 year old tells Sullivan that in becoming aware of his gay feelings he could not accept he was gay because effectively he couldn`t identify with any of the notions of "gayness" that he had. For many people the coming out process is still a deeply psychologically wounding one, regardless of whether you do it at 15, 20 or 25 years of age. What`s more, I would argue that most gay people are not aware of this psychological damage. If there is more space for us in modern society, we still have to traverse a long emotional bridge alone and there`s very little if anything that modern society does for us there.

I agree with Sullivan in so far as assimilation is concerned. Back in university(about 7 years ago now), I was motivated to coordinate a campus-wide Anti-Homophobia campaign to take the place of the traditional Gay Pride week. I came out in my first year of university to all my friends. I didn`t know anybody gay and I could not identify with the luminous pink posters of the LGBT society advertising wine and chocolate evenings and safe-sex classes. My campus,I felt, was a very socially conservative space which could only tolerate a stereotypical representation of gay people. 3 years later, still very much lost in my own personal difficulties in making progress with myself from a developmental and emotional point of view, I approached the LGBT society to ask them if they would be interested in running an anti-homophobia campaign during their traditional Pride week. With them on board, I went to the Students Union. It was obvious to me that the initiative would have to be seen to come from them. This was a student welfare issue. The SU was happy to go along once I looked after the organisation. It would be an anti-homophobia campaign run by the SU in conjunction with the LGBT society. My idea was to run a serious of events during the week in conjunction with other clubs and societies. Thus there would be a literary event with the Lit Soc, debates held in conjunction with the debating societies, a talk on homophobia hosted by the Sociology Society etc. We published a supplement in the university newspaper to announce the campaign and we wrote to all the clubs and societies asking them for permission to include their names on a page wishing the campaign success. Most societies responded favourably. We blanketed the campus with big posters that read "Homophobia Sucks" and distributed thousands of lollipops with the fliers listing the events for the week. Also in the supplement, we asked people to sign up as members of the LGBT society during the week to show their support. In comparison with previous Pride events run in isolation by the LGBT it was a huge success.

My thinking was that people should be able to come out in the social groups that they feel most comfortable in - where their interests lie. A rugby player should be comfortable being an out gay man in the rugby club and a law student likewise in the Law Soc. For me, promoting Pride in your homosexuality amongst people only at an age where they were first becoming aware of it or taking their first steps in exploring it was asking too much. To me an LGBT society didn`t make sense in the way that a debating society or a rugby club did because of course we are so much more than our sexuality.

If in the past coming out of the closet meant simply stepping into a big communal one, these days it`s synonymous with no such separatist action. I think that for many gay people future happiness is index-linked to one`s ability to reconcile one`s pre-coming out life with one`s post-coming out life. In the past, many gays benefited from the strong monolithic gay culture as it helped them either to sever all ties with their past lives or to live two lives simultaneously. These days young people coming out don`t have to sever links or live two lives. Yet I believe they still have problems reconciling the life they lived before coming out with the one they live after coming out. I think the fact that alcohol/drug abuse and addiction stats are higher among gays than straights as well as HIV infection rates is evidence of that failure to reconcile and to take stock of the psychological damage inflicted by coming to terms with being gay.

Sullivan cites the large gay vote received by Bush in 2004 in spite of his gay marriage amendment as proof of a more varied political discourse amongst gays today in comparison with the leftist stance of the monolithic gay culture. I would argue that in many cases - not his own, but in many - it is evidence of low self-esteem and internalised homophobia.

Those of us who`ve had dealings with gay activist organisations will have met those people who have chosen to fight for a cause in order to avoid dealing with their own problems - I would include myself in that group too. These days there are plenty of gay people who want absolutely nothng to do with gay politics and are quite happy living their gay lives in a manner not unlike your average straight person. Nevertheless, I believe that most of these people bear the scars of having come out and even if they haven`t gotten involved in activism to avoid confronting their pain, they have found some other way of not confronting it.
Sullivan is absolutely right in saying things have changed. But the waning of a monolithic gay culture and its giving way to more diverse representations may simply reflect the adaptions made by heterosexual culture and not any key progress made by a gay culture, which in its day failed to capitalise on its strength. To me Sullivan`s narrative is way too linear. It fails to acknowledge any sort of gay sentimental education different to that lived by heterosexuals growing up. Sullivan seems to welcome the change but I wonder if with the waning of the monolith, we didn`t miss some sort of golden opportunity.