Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

I live an ethical life. I think about by what means I justify my actions to myself and the world. For example: I was in a mall, went to use my bank's ATM facilities. It was very early morning. There was no one about. I had my card at ready, about to insert into slot, when I noticed two $20 bills were at rest in the cash delivery bay. No card in the machine, no transaction receipt. Just two twenties. I had come into the bank to withdraw $40. What should I do?

I considered my options. I could do nothing, transact my own withdrawal, though I opined that perhaps the machine was defective and the cash only got coughed out well after the card user had got pissed off and left. Perhaps the owner of the money was just spaced out and left without taking the cash. Perhaps, perhaps-- I will never know. I could take both twenty-dollar bills and put them in my wallet-- finder's keepers. Or I could-- and here is where I get tricky and profound-- I could take one $20 bill and leave the other, thus presenting my successor at this ATM bay with the same ethical dilemma I was in, without the option, however, of taking one and leaving one. I went on about this for ten or fifteen minutes. I finally scooped up the forty bucks and pocketed it. Why? I wanted to save the next person up from having to go through the moral wrangling I had just withstood, and, for such an effort, it seemed $40 was fair recompense. Was I wrong?

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I live in the new world created by our gay tribes, with new voices, new visions, and our own ethics. I, for example, reject completely the established world of Judeo-Christo ethics-- hostile and life-threatening to the queer people. I shop around for favorite inspirers, and these slots can change from season to season. Currently up is Friedrich Nietzsche, a guy who really wanted to throw Christianity into the toilet, flush it, and move on. True, FN was young and foolish in his Slave-To-Wagner phase. But he quickly got over it, the Wagners beings, I think, contestants in the Most Ghastly People In The 19th Century Kontest.

The other favorite is Karl Kraus, a Viennese publisher of his own self-published rag, Die Fackel, in English, The Torch, and Kraus put the torch to Siggy Freud's ass and read him to filth from the start. Best friend a gay guy could have. Filthy Freudism.

I need to work on our gay ethical culture. Can't take from what we have been fed. Two instances linger in mind, and both are from my past, sordid, I hope. (Paraphrase O. Wilde: "A man should have a future; a quean should have a past.") I was cruising The Fenway, Boston's public park for sexual encounters, and one of the people I most dislike was out and about too. I was on a bench, smoking a cigarette, when the man I disliked and another fellow had a set-to. Both had been after some cute student, and because of their overt and loud competition, the student had fled. They came out of the bushes and up to the parkway to have it out. The hateful one carried on; the other one threatened to slash to the hateful one's car tires, the hateful one was a very rich (and smelly) quean, from England, and his family had given him money to go away. In retrospect, this set-to was better that Plato's Symposium, and, you know, the older I get, the more I'm sure, had I been around, I would have hated that pompous, know-it-all, gas-bag Plato. What's he to Hecuba?

A few years later, I'm in a gay bar. It's a Monday night, and only the dedicated and hardy critters are there. My dream man came in. He was from New Hampshire. He wore the complete heavy-duty fireman's outfit, huge boots, the big mustache; he was gorgeous, sexy, and just my type to a T. It doesn't get any better. I can't recall what I was wearing, but it was appropriate. I wanted to have sex with this man so badly. As there were only eight people in the bar that Monday, I got him. We wound up in the men's, in a large stall, expecting some privacy. We did the poppers. I sucked his glorious cock. It was quite pretty, and I had all my fantasies working overtime. Then this happened: I felt warmth next to my cheek. And, in a flash, the cock I had been chewing on was promptly sucked out of my mouth into-- well, I had to look to see-- into another's! As this had never happened to me before, I felt myself a victim of a gay vampire, completely ruined my scene. Did I want him dead? I want most of the human race dead, at least when I get up in the morning. My ethics. The sex scene finished, not to my satisfaction or under my directions; the weasel, and that's what he was, had ruined it all. One wonders how many there are out there, the ones who need to show up at a gay bar on a Monday night, to plunge into a sex scene-- longingly and lovingly set up by its two participants, the plot points familiar and expected-- between two men in uniforms, all hot and in rut. I think the great ethical question winds up about them-- the intruding weasels.

New tribes need new ethics. It is ours-- mine-- to write, promulgate, and live. Wish me luck-- and no more gay vampires! They really do give the gay community a Bad Name and Set Back Our Cause 20 Years. **

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com