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It is time to clear the air.

I was at the meeting to which a local activist has been referring in social media posts, the purpose of which is to motivate people the get active in demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and, although I can understand his intensity and commitment, his repeated accounts of the meeting may contain facts, but they do not include all of the facts nor any nuance.

One of the topics on the agenda of the meeting was the call for an immediate cease fire in Gaza and an end to the Palestinian genocide. Although this was only one agenda item and not the first, it was known to be an important topic for the group’s co-chair and it was obvious that we were running through all the preceding agenda items as if they were not important in order to ge to the one the co-chair wanted to spend the most time on. As far as he was concerned, the other agenda items were in the way and unimportant.

This man is very well read and, while Palestine is a hot topic having a lot of people doing a lot of research since October, there is no way they will get anywhere near to where he is because he has been following events closely for years. It is understandable that his degree of concern far surpasses that of anyone around him and that, regardless how intense they might be, will never reach the level of his intensity. He, however, seemed not to see this or, worse, refused to accept a person’s intensity on any given topic must be measured against itself not against some one else being the benchmark.

What activist would not love for everyone with whom they deal to be as dedicated to the cause as they are, but just as filling various sized glasses to their rims brings them to their capacity, not all the capacities are equal when it comes to people’s intensity on any given topic. I have to accept the realistic capacity and not demand more than is possible. A shot glass filled to capacity, while unable to hold more, is filled to its capacity as a beer stein similarly filled is. I can’t put the same amount of liquid in both containers and complain when done that, although filled to its brim the shot glass will still hold less than the stein while both are full.

As the discussion on this item began, it was clear that this capacity difference existed and it was also clear that while the co-chair was centered on this topic from his position, there were others in the room that were viewing things on a broader level, and this was something he could not or would not grasp.

It would be nice if Joe Biden declared a ceasefire and a cessation of any support for Israel from the United States, but international entanglements are just that, entanglements, and are not always in boxes and along clear lines. You just do not walk out of the room assuming that this one action is all that is needed assuming there is nothing going on anywhere that is connected to that. Various countries are in agreements that benefit their country regardless how it affects other ones, and there are agreements within agreements among multiple countries that are at work and nothing can be a simple clean cut action.

If we view Bibi Netanyahu as some crazed leader, certainly Joe Biden knows he is and may also know what there may be in the shadows that this nut could misuse for his benefit and not ours in any way.

The problem at this meeting was that the co-chair would entertain no opinion that did not match his

exactly and this would result in the charge from the co-chair that you were pro-genocide without hearing what influenced your thinking to avoid an extreme action that looks good at the moment but might have ramifications later if the whole picture ian’t viewed.

When Michael Dukakis was running for re-election back in the 1980s, although he had done much good, he did not deliver on some important campaign promises and in the process insulted state workers among others. He had won by a landslide the first time, but too many people decided that if he won this time, the fact it was not a similar landslide would send the message to him that the state was somewhat displeased and this would motivate him to become more citizen-centric. Unfortunately this was not an organized approach that would have been impossible at any rate, and too many people sent the message leaving us to deal with his failure of a successor. Dukakis won in the next election, but he was more cautious and the citizenry a little shaken and cowed.

In the long run, although many of the mistakes made in the years between his governorships have been corrected, the state is still dealing with the affects of those years, many which are almost too subtle to be even noticed now. Those old battered “no Right On Red” signs are what is left of the governor’s objecting to the notion that idling at red lights when you could safely make the turn wasted gas. They are the relics of his hissy-fit when environmentalists dared to tell him what to do and why, when everyone knew the experts on petroleum and its affects on the people and the environment, the oil companies, his donors, said otherwise.

The chair’s suggestion that this approach be used now to send a message to Biden went a little too far when he suggested this committee actively work against Biden’s reelection until such time as he declares a ceasefire and withdraws all U.S. aid from Israel. What if we were so effective we couldn’t call the cattle back into the barn?

This might have been his issue and in his eyes the only issue, but others in the room saw things differently and for reasons important to them. However, anyone who expressed even the slightest concern was immediately labeled “pro-genocide” which let those in attendance know that whatever they had to say would be brushed aside with that accusation while their concerns and reservations were silenced.

I am a Gay man in my seventies who saw the changes since Stonewall. Hell. I worked for many of them in a variety of places at different times and in different political and religious environments. I knew what it took to get our rights and I have a pretty good idea how hard the battles will be to get them back if we lose them. This is a consideration when I am voting in an election where one candidate has pledged to take away my human rights. I was concerned that, while people felt warm and fuzzy because they had prevailed on one issue and moved on, I might suffer from the results with no one even noticing.

I was accused of not only being uninformed about genocide which automatically meant I was for it, but of viewing it from my privileged position as an American shielded from a true understanding of the affects of genocide or even an attempted one.

And this is why I feel compelled to clear the air.

There was no conscious effort to keep me from being Gay. The reality was that in my upbringing it was not a topic or consideration. I am amazed when people say they knew before elementary school that they were different when I, in my naivete, didn’t realize what I thought and did was so different when I thought thoughts were a variation of everyone’s thinking. I played some games because I liked them and avoided others because I didn’t. I liked art and music. My friends and siblings like them too in varying degrees so I did not think if I chose to draw rather than play a game of baseball I was exercising some huge personality difference. Because of this, I took forever to finally connect the dots that I just thought were, for the most part, similar to everyone until doing so showed me how wrong I had been. I was never good in math, so this lack of being able to add up the obvious made me a “late bloomer” and, as far as my timing, I decided I had to be who I was, throw open the closet door, read books, go to events, attempt to meet people, and enter my tribe just as AIDS hit.

That was my Welcome Wagon greeting into the Gay Community.

This unforeseen aspect of my future came out of nowhere and I was, as most people were, woefully ignorant as to what it was all about as healthy people I met were dead within weeks of that meeting from some Mediterranean old guy skin cancer. I was ready to handle as best I could what I was familiar with, but this aspect came as a total surprise.

As a Boomer, I was used to the routine that a disease could be eliminated by a Vaccine and if there wasn’t one, America would come up with one. I made it through polio and the various poxes, so, of course with this new disease there would be research, a vaccine, and then a cure. It was how medicine worked.

That is until it was decided for political reasons AIDS was God’s work.

Religious leaders saw a cash cow in using AIDS as a way to deal with the monster under the bed, totally fabricated stereotypes of Gay people useful in driving people to churches where collections would increase, and, if they could get the politicians to buy in, could get more of their Christo-fascist goals worked into laws. Demonizing a minority population was a traditional practice when your reasons for action are not based on reason, and we had lost the traditional monster because we saw with the Holocaust where such an approach led us to re-examine our own role in a culture that produced it. They had lost coerced prayer in public schools and women had gained some control over their bodies, none of which could be addressed head on and needed an approach that would first bring in the money with which they could buy politicians and since no one knew much about us, Gay people could serve that role and the religious pushed the idea that we as a people had gained too much and now God had decided to weed his garden and kill off the uppity Gay people.

Inspired by the success of religion wed to politics, wanting the political donations the religious leaders were promising, the federal government played along and watched us die.

Our lives were given over to political power and the money that could be raised.

Who cared that people were dying? The more religious leaders and politicians gained from the deaths, the more they were allowed.

Any saving of the Gay Community in the 1980s was the result of self preservation and the need to survive the government’s willful negligence and acceptance of religion based bigotry, and came from the targets of the genocide.

They not only watched us die, but did little to stop it. That is a form of genocide, and I was being told at the often misrepresented meeting that my “privilege” protected me from it and any true knowledge of what genocide is.

In 1985, a friend was hospitalized with AIDS complications. The hospital put him in a room alone, the room into which each shift would place their red hazardous material bags from all the hospital’s wards to be disposed of in the morning at trash pickup. A man with a nonexistent immune system had to share a room with hazardous material until rather vociferous complaints from friends changed that. The hospital may have admitted him but it had no intention to deal with him. He was, in their minds, there to die and they intended to just let that happen.

My fear that if the wrong people make up the next administration, the one that pledged to remove my rights, my fear that this loss of rights could sanction a future genocide of my people because of some religious or political belies is not pro-genocide.

The person who constantly refers to the people at the meeting as having been pro-genocide, uncaring, selfish is not being truthful and, sadly, in his intensity about genocide in Gaza, is misrepresenting those present and what they thought.

I survived an attempted genocide.

Many people I knew did not.

I had no privilege protecting me from that genocide and viewing what I faced in my Gay infancy as the result of privilege is beyond dismissive.

Yes, I oppose the genocide in Gaza.

In high school in the 1960s, I had a teacher who, because his parents were from Palestine, had served as a missionary there until he was brought back home because of some scuttle-butt about a possible impending war in the middle East. He had been removed from the conditions that resulted in the war in 1967. We learned in high school what was going on from someone who had lived there and continued to receive and pass on to us any updates he got. I also worked as an illustrator for a college textbook on the history of Middle East diplomatic since the First World War which meant I was in constant conversation with the scholars so my illustrations would be effective.

I am familiar with Palestine.

If I am to be faulted for anything, it is my concern that while I might make the lives of people elsewhere better, I might also make life at home impossible for my people. In the midst of obtaining my Creator endowed self evident rights, a death by virus was justification for denying those rights and preventing any further advances with death being the ultimate goal and tool to attain it. I watched almost a decade

of death by inaction and purposeful neglect and I know if given the chance, those who supported that, if they are back in office, will let it begin again in God’s name.

This is not pro-genocide. This is a target of an attempted genocide assaying how current events could erase the past and prevent the future.

The co-chair’s attempts to label me as “pro-genocide” to dismiss my legitimate concerns and the difficulty this introduces to a complicated situation shows a lack of a true understanding of genocide and who the victims had been, and it is not necessarily the same definition because it is based on differing sources and experiences.

They never locked us in refugee camps, but the idea to coral those of us who just wouldn’t die quietly in hospital rooms with bags of hazardous materials, had been a serious proposal. Manzanar was still around.

It is wrong to condemn one genocide while ignoring another, irrelevant?, genocide while telling the potential and actual victims of the attempt that they do not know what they had experienced and need others, perhaps the less privileged to explain it to them.

As a target of genocide I oppose genocide and resent I am being presented as the opposite as a strategy to bring people to a person’s way of thinking.

My concerns were and remain legitimate whether or not they fit another person’s mold.

He can oppose the Genocide in Gaza, but he cannot do it by denying and dismissing my life experiences.

Remember this when you read those who were at that meeting in question referred to as pro-genocide.

They are only pro-genocide because they do not measure up to this person’s standards which rise each time someone does.

Or did the attempted genocide of Gay people not qualify as serious enough to be acknowledged and is, therefore, so easy to ignore?

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I have often seen that my life is like a sandwich cookie in that, regardless what makes up the creamy middle, each end is either the same cookie or enough to be the same except for a few, minor cosmetic differences like color or design differences while in substance the same.

There are aspects of my youth that are repeating in my old age but not as I was led to believe they would.

I, for example , was taught to hold the door open for the next person, or give up a seat for an elder or a woman on a bus or train, led to believe such respect would be shown to me when I was the proper recipient age. The doors are still held open and the seats ceded to another but not as expected. I am still held to these duties especially the door holding even for the younger.

Apropos to present events, this sandwich cookie set up can be applied to the Olympics.

I was a post World War II child and having just defeated the Nazis, America was not going to just roll over for the Commies who, it seemed, were everywhere.

The Wall wasn’t even up yet but the divide between East and West Germany was clearly defined not only geographically but politically and philosophically. And when those were combined at the Olympic games it was clear the beliefs of the West kept us honest, but godless Communism encouraged rampant cheating for the glory of Mother Russia.

And so it was that each time a female athlete from East Germany won a medal of any value, while the American women won for their athleticism, the East German women won because they were really men raised as girls from an early age to appear to be trained female athletes.

This, of course, ignored the idea that perhaps girls in East Germany, being allowed to choose their sport or have it chosen for them, trained in it from an early age and not, as in America, having to wait until some arbitrary point in maturation that school systems decided what sports girls would be allowed to play regardless of personal leanings, but it worked for my father and his peers.

So now, it seems whenever a woman does well in a sport men would like to claim is their sole purview, and as there is neither a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or an East Germany, the problem this year is Transgender women and, by insisting on clinging to the security blanket that they are men pretending to be women, a lesser performance can be blamed on this years East German Problem.

The women we want to win are losing to men pretending to be women just as it was in my youth.

The cookie ends in this case are the generation before me blaming losses on East Germany’s faux females, and the other the younger generations’ claiming it is some Trans thing.

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 In 2017, as a volunteer transcriber at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, I was assigned the log book of the Newport, a whaling vessel out of San Francisco owned by a New Bedford firm, scheduled to spend three seasons hunting for Bowhead whales in the North Pacific whaling field from 1893 through 1896. As the Bowhead whale has an annual North/South migration, rather than chase them, knowing their route would take them through the Bering Strait into the arctic waters and since this would bottleneck them into a smaller expanse than the open Pacific ocean, for a number of years whaling vessels would gather at Herschel Island, 60 miles East of Barrow, Alaska, off the northern edge of Canada in the Fall, carefully winterizing the ships to withstand the forming ice in order to sit through the winter, making them into homes for the crews while other amenities were supplied by the company owned village established on land to wait for the whales to return in the spring and have them come to the whalers and not the usual way with the whalers chasing them.

     It was a common practice for whale ship masters to bring their wives on long voyages and spending the winter on Herschel Island as a couple was a good practice for them either because their wives were welcome additions who would have been left at home for those three years, or the wives had insisted on being there as the Indigenous women might be seen as too great a temptation for their otherwise devoted husbands. They knew their husbands. Those whale ship masters wintering on Herschel Island usually brought their wives and their children.

     During the winter of 1895, Sophie Porter, wife of Captain Porter of the Jesse H Freeman, took photographs of those wintering on Herschel Island that year and among them are those of the Captains, their ships, and their wives, the indigenous people, adults and children, and miscellaneous pictures of crew members.

     In the log books kept during that time on the Island, there are entries about the interactions of captains with their wives. We know the captains had sexual relations not only with their wives, but with the indigenous women. Captain Leavet, having fallen in love with and marrying an indigenous woman, left whaling, remained on Herschel Island for a time, and became a very prominent person in that area of Canada off of which the Island lay. Captain Leavet’s activities would have been noted as he was a captain, but if there were women available to him, they were also there for any crew member as well.

     Crew members did not have the privilege of bringing a mate with whom to winter, so if there was to be any sex for them, it was either with the Indigenous people in the area or each other.

     Until 2017, it would seem, the answer to the question regarding homosexual activity on whaling ships, whether or not it was merely situational or because of sexual orientation, or even, perhaps, as many whaling voyages took place before Psycho-analysis invented the word “Homosexuality” and created the gender binary, just natural, had consistently been that all-male crews isolated for months and years on a ship at sea and having natural needs would most likely have engaged in some form of Homosexual activity. It was a logical assumption with no actual record of any beyond what appeared to be Melville’s hints in Moby Dick and her of his writings.

     While studies have been done and books written regarding Homosexuality among pirates, a different topic as pirating and whaling, although taking place on ships, were not the same by nature, there has been no serious study of Homosexuality on whaling ships, or, if there is, it is being done quietly.

     The whaling ship Newport was wintering on Herschel Island over the winter of 1894-1895. Among the log entries is,

“Monday Feb 11th

A light breeze from the W.N.W. Cloudy and misty Bar. 30.10. Ther. -4 Got a load of meat put the Steward (Scott) forward for Sodomy and Onanism of Bark Wanderer one of the men deserted but was overtaken and brought back.”

    There are a number of archive sites with digitized copies of handwritten, historical documents making them conveniently available world-wide for anyone that has a need for them. Although most have yet to be transcribed into a digital, typed format, before being placed on such a site, a number of people read through the original manuscript listing items and topics they deem to be of interest to others,  leaving it up to a person who comes upon such an item in the list to read the original document for the information or go a bit further and transcribe it for the convenience of others.

     However, in the case of the Newport logbook, the previewers of the log may have mentioned whales, baseball games, hunting expeditions, and other items of interest found in the log and deserving of further research, but there was no mention of what might be considered an out of the ordinary occurrence on a whale ship and, so, something to be noted, the event with the steward, Scott.

     Because the transcription of the Newport log was needed for a specific purpose by a particular date, the task of transcribing the logbook was divided among a number of transcribers to save time, and it was by sheer luck that I got the section with the February 11, 1895 entry. There had been nothing in the topic summary that would have made the log anything special, and it is possible that, had that section been transcribed by someone else, being just words of little importance, they would have been simply typed out. We often ran into archaic nautical terms that we would look up when convenient if we remembered to, and having had to define “Onanism” to some well educated people, I could see how one of the other transcribers could just type out an unknown word whose meaning someone must know but not necessary for he or she to know.

     Upon being told about my discovery a few years after it, I was informed by a professor of maritime history, that, while reading certain log books for weather references, he had come upon a second log entry from a ship 50 years before the Newport entry, the Charles Phelps, that included the line, “allso tried to hire a Portuguese deckhand to commit Soddomy”.

    Just as with the Newport, reading the topics of interest on the cover page of the original log manuscript for the Charles Phelps as presented on the manuscript archive repositories, there was no mention of this although there was of the attempted poisoning.

   Considering the keeper of the log had recounted the steward, William H. Smith, getting 29 lashes for this and for having previously attempted to poison the captain whose steward he was by putting a chemical into the bread dough, this should be a topic of interest unless for some reason, and, perhaps this applies to the Newport as well and, maybe, even more logs, it was purposely omitted because such a topic went against the topics of interest list maker’s personal, political, and/or religious belief, thus denying a lead to anyone doing research in this area, It was either deemed of no interest to anyone, or it just did not register as important..

     If Homosexual activity was the target of research, the very logs with the sought after information would have been passed over and may have been prior to 2017, in the case of the Newport, by those who did not know they had been looking at what they sought.

     Finding two whaling crew members on two separate ships, decades apart, brought the assumption of Homosexuality into the realm of reality, and for over 150 years in one instance and over 100 in the other this information existed and remained unseen.

     The answer to the Question is now, “Yes. There was Homosexuality on board whaling ships. We have log entries on that topic.”

    A careful examination of the Historical record shows that when religion and politics wed, things like same sex activity needed to be regulated to ensure there was conformity and a continual resupply of the population could be met. If same sex coupling was allowed to continue, it could decrease the number of those needed to keep the monarch and all who benefited from his personage and largess in power as feudal armies, and the whole feudal system depended not on humanity, but a steady supply of people to send into battle and tax in order to do that. Those in same sex relationships also made the rules that controlled society a little fluid and if this “freedom” of expression without control spread, equality would have come sooner in history and monarchies and the system dependent on it ended just as soon.

   It would also show that there were more ways to do things than those demanded by church and monarch, and this fluidity of rights and thought could be dangerous to those in power.

     Politics often uses religion and vise-versa when beneficial to those who gain from the power of either. Or both

      When same sex couples were discovered in the act, although both people might be punished, the more ostentatious kind was meted out to the one who had either, in the case of a dominant Lesbian, usurped the male role, while in a male couple the harsher punishment was given to the one that assumed the woman’s role and demeaned his sex.

   When Psychoanalysis started up, in order to work, there had to be a normal and an abnormal, and the only delineation was that what the founders of psychoanalysis did was normal, while what they neither did nor were attracted to, or may have found objectionable, was abnormal.

     They had to take human sexuality that was boundless and put it into boxes.

     The term “Homosexuality” with all its assigned baggage did not come about until the late 1860s, and then being normal and abnormal could be measured and people put in cubbyholes. Most people are not aware that as the talk of psychoanalysis began to enter common conversation, non-Homosexuals wanted to know what they were called, and, so, in spite of the idea that their behavior was the norm, they were labeled Heterosexual.

     It, like Homosexual, was coined to label an invented category coming into existence as a word about a quarter century after the division.

   The reality is that the hard division only began when whaling was becoming a slowly dying industry and only when the artificial normal/abnormal divide was invented. The possibility exists that even as we look back and view examples of male/male interaction on whaling ships looking for the Homosexuals or just Homosexual activity, we may actually be rediscovering that there really never was and still is not in nature, a binary until we invented one and these men were not involved in Homosexuality but in human sex.

     Society’s rules did not apply on board a ship with its own micro-society. It was only when a crew member returned to port that he had to abide by community standards, and communities can become quite judgmental and condemning if properly influenced.

     What happened on the ship, an island, a port of call, or another ship, as in the Newport instance, stayed there.

     While looking for Homosexuality, we might actually prove that when free of society’s rules and expectations, real or created, Non-Binary is the normal human condition.

      If the assumption was that an all male crew being alone at sea was responsible for situational Homosexuality because of the environment and for that reason alone, any record of it on land where there were options would be important.

      As the whaling ship Newport was wintering on Herschel Island over the winter of 1894-1895, the log keeper wrote,

     “Monday Feb 11th

     A light breeze from the W.N.W. Cloudy and misty Bar. 30.10. Ther. -4 Got a load of meat put the Steward (Scott) forward for Sodomy and Onanism of Bark Wanderer one of the men deserted but was overtaken and brought back.”

     This was not isolated.  Scott was not out on a ship isolated with a stag crew for weeks, months, or even years.

     That year, from the beginning of wintering in the fall of 1894 until the sea was open enough to steam out of port in May of 1895, the population of Herschel Island was the largest in the company’s history of using that island. There were 1,500 people living on Herschel Island, not counting the Indigenous people who came in and out of the community to trade and the occasional visitors and company men who arrived via steamship and left after a while.  

     Captains were having sex with their wives, a birth is recorded, and captains, and presumably others, were having sex with Indigenous women, and, yet, even with the option, Mr. Scott was involved in Sodomy.

     His was not situational Homosexuality as it was not the only option caused by isolation.

     I had taken for granted that this entry was an example of an instance that attested in a log book that men were having sex with each other on whale ships, leaving the realm of accepted assumption to a fact.     

     By the time the captain had come upon Mr. Scott, the Newport had been sitting at Herschel Island for at least 6 months during which time there were captains and their wives doing what any husband and wife could do and mentions of interactions with the Indigenous people with one Captain marrying one and giving up his profession for a life in the North of Canada with her. There is mention of multiple social events in the Jesse H Freeman log, referred to often as Sophie Porter’s Journal, and the entertainment at these gatherings was often supplied by a theater group and/or the chorus formed among members of the various crews which would require practice and rehearsals which obviously could not be done with the men scattered on ships throughout the Pacific. You cannot rehearse band music, plays, and/or choral presentations in isolation.

     There are multiple mentions of baseball games played on the tundra, hunting trips with the indigenous people, small and large gatherings, and men who ran away in pairs and groups, some to be captured and brought back others to die in the wilderness or to actually get away safely.

     There was no forced isolation that would have resulted in the only sex among the crew being Homosexuality. On Herschel Island there were options from September to late April. There were no conditions that would call for Situational Homosexuality, just discrete hookups. To the contrary, Herschel Island was a community of 1,500 of the best and worst people and all between, and an ever changing Indigenous population that came and went for trade.

     Mr. Scott does not fit the accepted reason for Homosexual activity on a whaling ship as he was not isolated, was living in a large community with a great amount of interpersonal interaction, and could address his natural needs accordingly.

     He was found in the act of Sodomy not forced into it by circumstances, but apparently by will six months after arriving.

    What I originally saw as proof of an assumption related to all whalers might be, in reality, the discovery of an individual Gay man and the existence of more on Herschel Island as Mr. Smith may have had no problem with Onanism, but as he was found in the act of sodomy, he was not alone.

If someone chooses to prove my conclusion wrong, I welcome the verifiable corrections as it is the preservation of the real history that is important.

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