Michael's Corner

It’s June, a month that bridges late spring and early summer. June also means something else, and that “something else” has prompted me to write this post. I have hesitated for twenty days, fearful of the castigations that might ensue. But upon further review, I decided to let the haymaker fly because it’s coming from a good place—a place where resides our shared humanity and pursuit of a greater good.

Perhaps I’m dense (I won’t discount it), but I don’t know at precisely what point, epistemologically speaking, human sexuality and pride intersect. I am struggling mightily with the “pride” angle. I am heterosexual and male. I’m not proud of those aspects, I simply am them and cannot help being them anymore than I can help the color of my eyes or why my hair fell out. Human sexuality is not an ethnicity. Nor is it a culture or heritage. I’m afraid we have jettisoned ethnicity, culture, and heritage and replaced them with race, gender, and sexuality. Ethnicities, cultures, and heritages have delivered to humankind cuisine, music, art, language, fashion, folk lore, literature, architecture existing as monuments to human potential, dance (hula, tango, the Bolshoi ballet, etc.), humor, stage, and poetry— otherwise aspects of being human upon which humans can take pride. Meanwhile, race, gender, and sexuality (aside from the Marquis de Sade) have delivered to humanity……………….? I’ll wait:

Everything that we can hang our hats on is rooted in the plentitude that has flowered from human software—it’s the gift that keeps giving—yet it is on the hill of human hardware that we chose to die. I often wondered how those from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam feel when, once they set foot in America, all they get to be is Asian. Talk about cultural humbug! So, let’s flip the script: Imagine that an Inuit from Northern Canada and a Guatemalan applied for a position with Apple and all they could say for themselves was that they were North American— their culture, heritage, and ethnicity homogenized, reduced to a continent.

It would be refreshing to see a reemergence of culture, heritage, and ethnicity in the West and the shoving of race, gender, and sexuality to where it belongs… on the sidelines, posing as bystanders of little consequence. Now rip open a can of Guinness, do it with pride, and know that race, gender, and sexuality had no hand in its greatness.