Plus ça change . . . Thoughts on the March of Time

[PeterRS]

This is basically the third in the occasional series I wrote for a friend's blog a few years ago. The first two are found in the Experiences of Asia (Gay-Related) to While Away These Difficult Times thread under Gay Asia. This is much more general. It was also written at the start of 2017. I have looked at updating it, but sorry to say that involves too much work. So if you can think back to 2017, this will all make more sense and may make for an interesting short read.

Change has Improved Some Gay Men’s Lives, but not Others

Change affects us all throughout our lives – partners, friends, where we live, the fashions we wear, our hobbies, passions. You name it, for most of us life is a never-ceasing process of change. Almost frighteningly, it seems to gets faster as we grow older. I used to think life would slow down once I passed 50. Not a bit of it. Time moves forward with almost frightening speed. So much to do and less time to achieve it.

As we start yet another year, as yet another line appears on our faces and a centimetre to our waists – oh, I just hate you gym bunnies! – take a moment to think of the changes that have occurred over the last 50 years. Since 1967 men have walked on the moon and the rich have travelled supersonic on Concorde. China had recently entered into a disastrous Cultural Revolution. Yet in 1967 it joined the nuclear club by testing its first nuclear bomb and would emerge as the world’s second largest economy. Thankfully the constant fear of a world-ending nuclear war was slowly to come to an end with the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union two decades later.

In 1967 the average cost of a new house in the USA was $14,250 and in the UK £3,700. The US-led War in Vietnam had escalated into a maelstrom of horrific proportions drawing Cambodia and Laos into its theatre of operations before pulling out, leaving Cambodia in a political vacuum and the resultant unimaginable genocide of the Khmer Rouge.

On a lighter note, in 1967 The Beatles issued the iconic album “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his World Heavyweight boxing title for refusing conscription into the US Army and Elvis married Priscilla. The world’s first heart transplant took place in South Africa, the first ATM machine appeared (in London) and Israel won the Six-Day War. The price was heavy, though. A barrel of oil that year cost US$1.50. Soon the world economy entered a tailspin as the Arab producers’ oil cartel OPEC increased the price by almost 500% in 1974 and a further 280% in 1979.

A prisoner for 27 of his 95 years, Nelson Mandela became the world’s conscience and a beacon of hope for peaceful change. Vladimir Putin, the former KGB agent of whom President George W. Bush famously declared, “I looked the man in the eye . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul!” proved that Bush’s eye for character was as flawed as his decision to invade Iraq on false pretences. Putin was soon to show his real hand only too clearly.

In 1967 Jim Thomson, founder of the Thai Silk Company still bearing his name and strongly rumoured to have been one of Bangkok's closet gays of the time, vanished without trace walking in the forest in Malaysia. US Navy pilot John McCain was shot down over North Vietnam. Actor Julia Roberts and CNN’s gay anchor Anderson Cooper were born. Another gay man, Beatles manager Brian Epstein, committed suicide. 

Advances in technology soon vastly improved most lives. Fax machines, scanners, CDs, mobile phones once the size of a brick and now so small they slip easily into pockets, digital cameras and recording, smart TVs, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook . . . What advances are 2017 likely to bring?

All the while in what is called the developed world our lives as gay men are very different compared to 50 years ago.

In the USA, President Eisenhower had issued an Executive Order in 1953 barring gay men and women from all federal jobs, quickly followed by many state governments. The FBI intensified its surveillance programme against known and suspected homosexuals. It was not until the Stonewall Riots of 1969 that gay men in the USA really began to organise. Then just as countless millions around the world were tentatively celebrating their freedom from the closet, a sword appeared threatening to strike all down with a new and unexplainable disease given the acronym AIDS.

Those who lived through that first decade of the incurable disease will never forget the fear that gnawed at gay communities and preyed on our minds whenever we had sex with another man. Would we be the next victims? Many of us wept as we lost friends and friends of friends. But we marvelled at the love and compassion shown by lovers and carers as they helped make the end of life as comfortable as possible.

Whatever the tragedies, there is surely no doubt that AIDS made most of the understanding world aware that gay people were everywhere, not just closeted in little ghettos. And perhaps the silver lining of the crisis is that this knowledge eventually led more and more to understand why gay people are no different from them – except we like to have sex with and be partnered with members of our own sex. Many – but far from all – were moved by books and movies which began to explore the subject of AIDS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYJYW_9mFVg

Clip from “Philadelphia” (1993) with Tom Hanks as the AIDS patient

1967 was bittersweet in a matter of law. England and Wales finally struck from the statue book the out-dated Victorian law criminalising homosexual behaviour. Sadly, before it retreated from its Empire, the United Kingdom had singularly failed to strike out parallel laws in former colonies. 

Vikram Seth, the gay author of the marvellous novel “A Suitable Boy”, recently said, “You find homosexuality in the Kama Sutra . . . in the Hindu tradition, the Muslim tradition, the syncretic tradition . . . there has never been intolerance of this kind.” Indeed, half of the world’s countries that criminalize homosexuality today do so precisely because they cling to Victorian Britain’s idea of morality. And in ten nations, including former colonies, the punishment for being gay is death.

 

So, as we celebrate the arrival of gay marriage in several countries including, I believe, soon in Taiwan, as we celebrate all the advances that have been made over the last 50 years for the gay community as much as for the world community, we must remember that for far too many of the peoples on our planet, not much has really changed. Today Taiwan is the one beacon of light that hopefully will lead the way to greater LGBT acceptance. This ad was recently seen on the Taipei MRT stations.

For those for whom progress has largely passed them by, perhaps the French express it best in the saying, “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.” Usually said in a spirit of resigned acknowledgement,  “the more things change, the more they remain the same” is sadly too true for too many.

Let us hope that more and more positive changes will eventually come, and that “plus ça change” will be uttered less in 2017.