Letters to the Editor
Ballsee
Published Letters: 233 Editor's Choice: 19
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Butt Out!
[Read the article: Should I tell his wife he's gay?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Linda Flores: And for everyone who is arguing for the LW to keep his mouth shut because information mnight end the marriage, then basically they are arguing for the relationship to keep going on its foundation of lies.
You're mischaracterizing the concerns of those of us who want LW to stay out of it. I certainly don't think the LW should stay out of it because the marriage might end. I think the LW should stay out of it because he doesn't know what the "situation" is, or even if there is a situation. Neither do any of the posters here. The only thing we know about the "situation" is what the LW has told us. Even he's not been privy to the couple's realationship for "years." The projections and fantazies and moralizing that posters have made here about this are all predictable, given the unrealistic expectations we grow up with about relationships thanks to popular culture. Human relationships are messy, and they come without any gurantees, most of them, sooner or later, are as full of pain and confusion as often as they are of sweetness and light because few of us know entirely what's inside ourselves, which keeps changing, or because it threatens the world we've made or think we want or been told to want. The LW should stay out of it because he doesn't know what the situation is. He's waited "years", at his own admission. Even under the best of circumstances, I strongly advise against interferring in someone else's personal relationships. At the most the LW should have confronted his friend before the wedding and certainly not his friend's wife. He missed his opportunity to raise any ethical concerns he might have. He should absolutely stay away from the wife with this. If you or he thinks he's doing "good" by going to the wife with this old information you're arrogant, presumptious, selfish, self-involved fools and if he does such a low-down dastardly act (always in the name of doing "What's Right" in the same sense that all wars are fought for justice and peace.) he should be horse whipped. This situation is obviously full of hidden intentions on the part of the LW. Something's wrong with this. The LW has just as much a hidden agenda as you're assuming the husband has or had, maybe, simply because he had what may amount to nothing more than a homosexual fling. One or two homo acts doesn't anymore make one "gay" than one or two hetero acts makes one "straight." "Gay" and "straight" (dumb term) are social identifiers. Homosexual and heterosexal are adjectives that describe acts, not people. I'm not trying to protect the husband, I'm trying to protect the sanctity of marriage. And neither you nor the LW has any idea what this couple may at this point have discussed or agreed to.
Whatever it is that you think you or anyone else "knows" about this marriage, you don't. And whatever fantasizes you have about what will transpire if LW sticks his nose into it at this point, are wrong. It never plays out the way you imagine it will because there are things about it that you don't know, can't know. My "friend" who decided to stick her nose into my affair (I'd maintained a relationship with my partner for 11 years and at 50 she'd not had one that lasted beyond a year, so she knew more about relationship than I do, why? Because she's a woman? Another popular myth.) came crawling begging for my forgiveness after a year because things didn't work out the way she thought they would or should. By that time it was too late. Although my partner and I re-united, he'd become HIV positive. He didn't get HIV from being in a relationship with me, he got HIV from NOT being in a relationship with me. I'm still HIV negative. The posters assumptions about STDs and HIV are obviously biased and do not always reflect reality.
Lord save us from people who want to save us.
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HIV/AIDS
[Read the article: Should I tell his wife he's gay?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Of course this being the U.S., this has now become about something else. Now it's become about the rampant ignorance and fear-mongering about HIV/ADIS mixed up with the pervasive homophobia that percolates throughout this society from the Presidency all the way down to the local beer hall. You could lay out facts from here to the moon that would discredit all of these notions and people are still not going to be seperated from their ignorance. Shouting HEALTH!, HEALTH!, HEALTH! when it comes to homosexual behavior indicates that a great many people have not moved beyond the 15th century. Heterosexual sex, which accounts for the overwhelming majority of HIV transmissions in world population, can also be credited with a host of other maladies, malfunctions and diseases, usually, though not exclusively, to the offspring. No one's suggesting that just because you have heterosexual sex that you should right away go to a shrink, seek medical attention, or consult your local religious authorities to receive the laying on of hands to cast out demons and bad blood. That homosexualist men are again smeared with this idiotic nonsense indicates yet again how thoroughly entrenched is the heterosexual tyranny under which we all suffer and how profound is the homophobia that continues without respite in the U.S.
We do what we can resonably be expected to do, given the information we have at hand, to protect ourselves and to inform the people we care about hopefully without creating more problems or causing more pain in the process, which is what those of us who are opposed to the LW interfering are trying to say. It's a risky world. Things expire, stuff goes bad, people make bad choices, relationships change, things fall apart, people get sick, get old. Everybody dies.