AltBrothers

There’s something I want to bring up here at AltBrothers that I feel cuts to the core of our self-acceptance or self-rejection as same-gender-loving men of pan-African/afro-Polynesian descent. That thing I want to start touching on is the big “G” word - GENDER. I’m going to touch on it with the help of people who’ve had the time, training, and experience to dissect some deep issues we’ve been handed from human history with emphasis from our cultures.

I’m going to start out by saying that I believe there is a spectrum of qualities that go full-length between what we call “male” and what we call “female”. And guess what, I believe that there are humans sitting at every little step of the way on that spectrum. Some of you have heard about the Kinsey studies on human sexuality. Liam Neeson starred in the movie by the same name that was in theaters last year, remember? I’ll be honest, some of that pushed my buttons but that’s not the point here. Kinsey and his legacy only studies the Who, What, When, Where, How of our human gender and sexuality. In some ways, answering all those points is a lot, but it’s still missing a major part, the “Why” part of our gender ideology and the real life gender-rules we impose on ourselves and which society at-large imposes and reinforces on and against us.

There are a few ideas out there that attempt to explain the “Why” and organized religion has played a large role in trying to define both the question and the answer. This was brought home recently when my father, a retired church worker whome I’ve been out to for years, handed me an ex-gay video on our last visit. The recent about-face by a former contributor to AltBrothers, K. Godfrey Easter, also reiterates the real-life gender-ideology and pressures which the church is active and skilled in deploying. A gifted man is driven to self-hate and “denouncements” of his god-given bisexuality, all to preserve the myth of total and singularly embodied maleness or femaleness; the myth even lie (unreality) of total and singularly embodied heterosexuality or homosexuality in the human family. But religion isn’t the only thing with a vested interest - politics and economics also been involved in the past, just as they are today.

With that said, I encourage you to read the short article by Maggie Macary called A Gender Spectrum

A Gender Spectrum by Maggie Macary, Ph. D

Other helpful reading:
Creation Myths (Humans of all stripes asking the same question “Where did we come from?” and forming different story-answers)
The Kinsey Institute