The final piece of the puzzle is that just as any form of love, homosexuality
has endured times ancient and modern, and will continue to do so. I leave
you with the poem, “De Amicitia” (Of Friendship) by the English poet Alfred
Edward Housman. He wrote this sometime in the late 1920s or 1930s, those
years in which anti-Semitism was fashionable and racism was in fact the
dominant political ideology of Western civilization, so naturally he felt it best
not to have this published until well after his death. In this poem, Housman
buries his love for his dear friend and love, Mr. Moses Jackson, in the very
act of commemorating it, as his feelings of love break his friendship, and
must be carried silently to the grave:
“Because I liked you better
“Than suits a man to say
“ It irked you, and I promised
“To throw the thought away.
“ To put the world between us
“We parted, stiff and dry;
“Goodbye, said you, forget me.
“I will, no fear, said I.
“If here, where clover whitens the dead man's knoll, you pass, and no
tall flower to meet you
starts in the trefoiled grass,
“Halt by the headstone naming
the heart no longer stirred, and say the lad that loved you
was one that kept his word.”
Moses Jackson died in the 1920s, and Housman died in 1936. In its crisp
rendering, the passion in the poem, the interflow of love and friendship lives
on, surviving every war, tsunami and holocaust that has struck since those
years and any other calamity likely to come our way, including the entire
mortal lives of countless charlatans, sadists and hypocrites. The bygone
generations have had to exorcise more sinister demons in their time, but as
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