I still have a few things to do before I head out to Lazy Bear tomorrow morning, but I can deal with them then. Tired now and going to sleep.
Oh, yeah, click here to see my ad for the Hairrison Street Fair program.
July 31st, 2007 | Hairrison Street Fair, Lazy Bear Weekend | No comments
Trey (arkanjil) recommended this: http://whitecrane.typepad.com/journal/2006/07/don_kilhefner_g.html
WHY DO GAY ADULTS MATTER?
Adults fulfill many important roles in the gay village. Here I will discuss three of those vital roles—blessing the gifts of the youth, providing mentoring to young men, and tending to the general material welfare of the village or tribe.
The poet Robert Bly once remarked that any man who is not blessing young men is cursing them. There are serious consequences in the gay community when there are no elders and adults present blessing the young. The most important is that youth gets disoriented and lost. Parents rarely do the blessing these days because they are hardly ever around anymore due to the consumer economy and credit card slavery. Moreover parents are often clueless because they never had their own gifts acknowledged. For most youth today the babysitter is the television set, the playmate is the video game, and the mentor is the computer—none of which will bless his gifts or even give a hill of beans about them. Young people cannot see their own genius and generally think they are rather dumb no matter how arrogant they act in public. The phrase I hear most often from the young gay men with whom I work is variations of: “I’m really stupid, aren’t I.� Remember, youth has little inner authority; for them all authority is external—parents, teachers, priests. Possessing inner authority is usually a hallmark of becoming an adult. If adults are not present helping them develop that inner authority, it may never happen, and their lives may truly be divided into younger gay and older gay with nothing in between. Our community will be impoverished as a result.
The way it works is that some adult whom the youth respects and trusts must acknowledge, name, and bless his gift (s) repeatedly. The major turning point of my life happened when I was in the 8th grade and it involved a blessing of my genius (from the Arabic word geni meaning “spirit�). I had planned to drop out of school in the end of the 8th grade to become a carpenter since to my 13 year old, pubescent-fevered brain the sexiest men seemed to be carpenters. One day in Social Studies class we were working on an assignment in class and my teacher, Mrs. Eula Mae Kline, was walking around helping the students. When she got to me she put her arm around me in a very loving way and whispered in my ear: “You know Donnie you are a very smart boy, very smart, and if you did your homework you would get nothing but A’s on your report card.� At the time I was getting C’s, D’s and F’s. No one ever said that to me before. I thought I was stupid. It turned out she saw something in me. Her blessing of one of my gifts changed the course of my life I was right though about the carpenters.
July 30th, 2007 | Service, Spirit | No comments