08/01/2025
Hello again and welcome to Wednesday.
You find me in a deeply reflective mood.
In all the years I have been writing these messages, I have tried to use my experiences of life, laced with a drop of humour, to highlight what I rather grandly consider to be my philosophy for life. I try and do it with a light touch as I don’t want to come across as too preachy.
I write about how, in the face of death, we must not give up on life.
I try to acknowledge the harsh reality of death and grief but then I write about the restorative power of love. The gift of memory.
I write about kindness and decency.
I write about our common humanity. How we have the power to lift others at the lowest point in their lives.
I write to provoke thought.
I might write absurd stuff, but within it there is hopefully a seed of something important. My hope has always been that I can quietly influence folk to be a little bit kinder to themselves and others.
I see now what a fool I have been.
That influence lies with the powerful, and if the powerful spread messages of hatred and disinformation, there are too many willing to believe it. The age of populism and disinformation is upon us. Conspiracy theorists are king.
Opinion is not truth.
Claims of exercising ‘free speech’ should not be a get out of jail free card, allowing you to insult and attack people you don’t happen to like. People who are different.
Decency and reason are dying.
Am I being too dramatic?
Am I too sensitive?
I can’t help the way I am.
I’m not an aggressive person. I’m not confrontational.
I’m accepting of others. I like to think I’m a pretty decent bloke. I’m not perfect, I make mistakes but never driven by hate.
I try so very hard to avoid hate.
Around me I see so much of it. I feel like King Canute trying to hold back a tide that will not be turned.
Let me give you one example as to why I feel my way of seeing the world, and the people I share it with, is under threat.
Let's look at the recent death of James Lee Williams aka The Vivienne. A very talented individual whose death at the age of just 32 was so shocking to many, including me.
You might think why does a celebrant in Mansfield, someone who never met the person in question, need to comment about such events. Well I’m going to explain.
I guess it was around 40 years ago, that a drag queen helped changed my view of the world and of life.
This was a defining time in my personal growth as a human being.
I was working in an organisation often riddled with every shade of bigotry you could imagine. I didn’t always find this a pleasant atmosphere to be in but you sort of went along with it as nobody wanted to stand up or speak out. I’m not overly proud of that.
I hadn’t been raised to be hateful to anyone, I was raised to be polite. Having lived with kind people, I expected everyone to be like that. Again, a foolish mistake.
Anyway, I recall this one night very clearly. I was on foot patrol and I got sent to a report of a man being beaten up in the street.
When I arrived at the scene, the offenders had fled, but there, sitting on the kerb, bleeding from several nasty cuts and contusions, was Chris.
He was initially reticent to speak to me about what had happened. It gradually became apparent that Chris had been targeted because he was gay. It was a ‘gay bashing’. I don’t like the phrase, we might now call it a hate crime.
Chris declined medical care and as he didn’t live far away I escorted him home and stayed with him until a friend arrived. He declined to make an official complaint but I felt compelled to revisit him a few days later to see how he was doing.
This is when I discovered he was, on occasion, a drag queen.
Over the course of the subsequent weeks and months I got to know Chris a little better. He was really good fun to be around and it also emerged that Mrs B and I knew one of his friends, Tony.
We didn’t socialise or stay in touch at that time but eventually Chris came back into my life, when he was diagnosed with HIV.
I had joined the local HIV/Aids Support group - not a very popular decision with some of my work mates. I wanted to help support folk who were being stigmatised, and to try to dispel the myths and fear that circulated about the virus at that time. I saw it as an extension of my job, helping those in need.
Both Chris and Tony would die due to HIV/Aids.
I attended their funerals. I helped carry Tony’s coffin.
This was a sad end to their stories but there are aspects I haven’t told you about yet.
The hatred they experienced just for being themselves.
I already mentioned the physical violence so here is just one more example.
After it became publicly known that Tony was HIV+, he had his windows smashed by people throwing bricks.
I will never forget going to see him that day, I had to go as one of my colleagues had refused to enter the house. Tony was trying to keep warm in bed, aided by two of his friends, acting as human hot water bottles. He still had a sense of humour about it all but I was so angry on his behalf. I still am.
I could list many more examples but I don’t want to today.
I don’t want to think about the awful abuses that people like Chris and Tony went through. That’s not how they deserve to be remembered.
What I want to tell you about is how they both retained their dignity and Tony especially, always laughed stuff off. He shouldn’t have had to.
It was through knowing Chris, Tony and many others that we supported, that I came to understand that hating people who were ‘different’ was a choice you didn’t have to make.
These were just people, like me. They laughed and cried as I did. They worked and paid their bills. They wanted to be free to live their lives. Like me.
I have tried all of my life to be accepting of others, not least in memory of those friends I lost. Friends who received such awful abuse just because of who they loved.
My hope back then was that across the years people would become less ignorant, more tolerant and accepting of others.
I hoped in vain apparently.
I am so disheartened to see how easily some folk can hate another person. And to express that hatred so feely, especially, but not exclusively, online.
Over Christmas, The Vivienne was a guest on Blankety Blank and the outpouring of hate and negative comments was breathtaking.
I will not repeat them here of course, but so much of this is fuelled by right wing commentators and news outlets. And ignorance. They seem to have forgotten that the show was once presented by Lily Savage! But never let the facts get in the way of a good hate filled rant.
The Vivienne played The Wicked Witch in a touring production of The Wizard of Oz and was very good by all accounts. Mrs B and I sat with Polly this last weekend to watch the new film version of Wicked. An excellent film with some very clear messages.
At one point the Wizard tells Elphaba; “the best way to bring folks together, is to give them a really good enemy”.
This is how populism works. This is why homophobia remains such a brutish weapon in that battle. But you’re being sold a lie.
It’s the same with racism too.
People now find it so easy and acceptable to hate a new born baby just because they were given the name Mohamed. I mean what’s happened to you as a person when you can hate an innocent child just because they are different?
Who knows what potential positive impacts that child might have on the world when they grow up? But you hate them before they can even walk and talk?!?
Because you are told to. Because they are different. Dangerous. They are the enemy.
Hating someone is a choice you do not have to make.
If you do, it says so much more about you than about the person you are targeting.
Hating people who are different does not make the world a better place nor does it make your life any better.
I will be forever grateful that life gave me the chance to be a better person thanks to the many gay friends I had, and still have.
And to you reading this, if your response to the death of another human being, a talented and much loved person, is to be hateful and hurtful, then please stop reading this page and absent yourself from my life.
My ‘words of wisdom’ are obviously not what you want to hear.
Let me end where I began. For as long as I have had this page there has been one overriding message that I’ve tried to impart.
BE KIND.
I think I need to be kind to myself and take a few weeks break.
I need to focus my energy where it perhaps CAN do some good - at work, with the bereavement cafe, and recharging my battery.
Have a good day. Hope to see you soon.
