Australian one-time Olympic swimming champion, the impossibly prepossessing Ian Thorpe, has now admitted what has long been rumoured and anyone with even a minimally-functioning "gaydar" has believed all along—he is gay.
I have two great regrets about this—one, that this divine creature has never been gay with me; and two, the world has been such that he has felt constrained to pretend that he is straight all these years. Evidently he reiterated this lie in a recent autobiography, even though in the same memoir he was candid enough to acknowledge that he suffered from severe depression—the result, no doubt, of living that self-same lie ... of inauthenticity.
I sincerely wish Ian the romantic happiness that has thus far eluded him—I wish him oceans and oceans of it.
I'd also use the occasion to remind people with libertarian tendencies that while we, as freedom-lovers, welcome a milieu in which people like Ian who might otherwise remain closeted for life now feel free to be open about what they do or would like to do with other consenting adults in private (actually, a milieu in which they could say simply, "It's none of your effing business" and be left alone after that would be good too), we do not endorse the reverse-side of the homophobic coin: heterophobia, whose homo-nazi practitioners secretly (and sometimes not so secretly) wish homosexuality to be not merely legal but compulsory and heterosexuality to be criminalised (an idea with considerable appeal to me, I have to confess, but whose appeal I generally resist except on Thursdays).
It disturbed me to hear that the Georgian soprano slated to play Desdemona to the Otello of Simon O'Neill (writer of one of the Forewords to my book The One Tenor, who from all accounts has been beyond stellar as the jealousy-crazed heterosexual Moor) was sacked by Opera Australia for a tweet in which she referred to homosexuals as "sewage" (an allusion, no doubt, to what it is that gay men are thought to plunge their penises into). What on earth did that have to do with her singing?! (What she should have been sacked for was participating in that foul fount of fatuities, Twit-Witter, at all ... but I digress in parentheses yet again.)
A milieu in which people are free to express such sentiments as well as their opposite ... that would be an advance. A milieu in which an Ayn Rand is as free to express her homophobia as a homo-nazi to express her heterophobia, while neither is able to enforce her phobia. "I disagree with what you say, but defend to the death your right to say it," etc. As it is, I fear, the fashionable, politically correct pink swastika rules; homosexuals are able to come out of the closet without trepidation, but heterosexuals are being driven into it.
That is not an advance, just an exchange of bigotries.
Linz
Coming attraction: Authenticism
