Pride

We’ve been watching a new-to-us TV mystery: The Doctor Blake Mysteries. Set in post-World War II Australia, it shows a part of the world reeling from the aftermath of the war, the on-going conflict in Korea, and the dirty little secret of UK nuclear tests on Aboriginal lands.

But what has really struck me, made especially more poignant after celebrating with our LGBTQIA friends, was an episode that opened with a man dying in a car crash. Bit by bit, it’s revealed that he was dying from a Asian Pit Viper snake bite before the crash. The snake was put in his car by a jilted former lover. It’s a love triangle of three men, at a time when it was illegal (unnatural acts was the term) to be who these men were. Doctor Blake treats the other two men, as each ends up in police custody, and treats them with great care, and with an interpersonal cost to himself. You can see how gay men (and women) were closeted in those days, having few people they could trust with ‘their secret’.

At the same moment that I’m viewing this, and thinking about how far we have come, I am struck by how some folk want to go back to that time. A time where white male heterosexuals ruled and made the rules. We will not go back there.

I belong to a Christian church that has participated in the Pride parade and rally at the state capitol for twenty years now. My friends are not the ‘Christians’ that can’t bake a cake for a gay couple, or won’t allow them into the stores. Instead, they are the Christians that bakes the cakes, come to the weddings, celebrate, and dance their butts off afterwards. We’re the Christians that care but don’t mind who you are or where you are on life’s journey, how much you believe or how little. The present is rainbow, the future is rainbow.