Destiny

I took that test. And surprisingly enough, it sent me to Purgatory.

The Dante's Inferno Test has sent you to Purgatory!

Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level | Score

Purgatory | Very High

Level 1 - Limbo | Moderate

Level 2 | High

Level 3 | Low

Level 4 | Very Low

Level 5 | Moderate

Level 6 - The City of Dis | Very Low

Level 7 | Low

Level 8- the Malebolge | Moderate

Level 9 - Cocytus | Low

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I hope you don't mind, but I followed your url information from matty's blog. I was curious to find out more about the person I was having a pseudo-conversation with. I think I may be coming back more often - if you don't mind of course. You remind of a friend I have in Switzerland. :)

I'm sorry I can't offer you a picture or even the url of my website but if you understood my culture and the stigma involved you would understand my hesitance in revealing anything too personal about myself.

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This and subsequent entries in response to comments thread Grabbing Hold of Life, courtesy M. Kelleher.

Oh, and rather than post on poor ol' matty's blog, I thought I'd post my reply here so he doesn't tire of us. Hope you don't mind. I apologize if you feel any intrusion is suffered. If you do, simply leave a note and I'll understand.

But anyway:

At least we seem to agree on some points. I admit to being far too cynical for my years. But you try living with separated ultra-conservatives for parents for 20 very trying years someday. Or perhaps you do, in which case I applaud your ability to hang on to your goodwill towards men and belief in human nature till now.

I agree its unfair that we can't have children but any drunk straight teenager can (someday, oh someday). But in retrospect I suspect that it's for the better in the sense that I don't think the gay society is ready for it yet at any rate. I still get a sense of immaturity about the 'scene'. Too many people being too narcissic or too involved in being 'gay' that if they weren't I doubt that they would have anything else to be. And it saddens me.

These are bright, talented young people, but they're too involved in just being their sexuality and not anything else. They discuss men like girlfriends (guilty), they party like it's 1999 (guilty) and they sleep around like any philandering man would (not guilty - so far. Think of that what you will). But in which any case, they feel strongly, they love passionately... but they also forget quickly.

I hate hate hate to say this, but I do not think that children, especially terminally screwed up children in this case (if my own personal experience is anything to go by), should be allowed to have children. But as you said, the cases are frustratingly individual. I cannot speak for the whole of the culture, but neither can I vindicate the culture itself. As time goes on and the more I learn, the more I'm shocked to learn mow much of that culture itself has grown around fun and c'est la vie.

I find sometimes the idea of social responsibility (other than advancing their own social/political agenda) sorely lacking in most gay men I know (once again, I stress that my sample is small). And being that these gay men will indubitably be the social circles that these same sex couples with children move in, I cannot believe that it would be in the best interest of the child.

Perhaps yes, the couple itself is a cohesive body and yes, they truly love each other and their child. But what of their friends? To leave one of my mates to babysit a child of mine? There are only two people I would personally trust with that responsibility, and one of them is straight.

Yes, I'm cynical. But I guess I personally prefer to err on the side of caution. I just don't think that the culture allows for children at the moment, the culture is still growing and it's still struggling itself.

It scares me, but the 'live fast, die young' mentality is more prevalent today in gay culture than any other part of society. Is that really the atmosphere to bring up a child in?

To argue further, I would only have to say this, I say difficult because of the following things:

1) The couple must have dedication. Dedication to each other and dedication to their child. Especially to their child since only one of them could possibly be biologically related to the kid.

2) The couple must have time. Time to raise and support the child, time to teach and play with the child, far more than any straight parents would ever need. For a same sex couple raising a child at this time (who can say what the future brings?) raises complications of social circles and sexuality with the child perhaps long before they are due. And these issues are important enough to the child's welfare that they must be addressed and the child supported through it.

3) The couple must have money. Money enough to be totally blameless when raising the child. Money enough to see the child gets only the best. For their raising of the child reflects now not only upon them, but on the rest of the 'culture'. To raise a child in bad conditions _with_ all these added problems and complications is not only irresponsible, it is reprehensible. What happens to the child today and in the child's future will decide what legislators decisions will be in the future. How the child grows will be a reflection on all of us.

Which brings me back to the point of the 'culture' being too immature. Unfortunately, how ever much we want to be one of 'them', we can't. We have to be better. Because we are not accepted, and that acceptance will be a long time coming, until then we have to be better to show that not only can we do it, but we can do it better. To do any less would be failure. I don't think I ask too much. I simply think that this is the only option if you want to raise a child in a same sex relationship.

But perhaps I'm arguing a moot point.

Verily, I know a number of people who would be hard pressed not to become frustrated in responding to you; some just aren't willing - or rather, used to - sitting back and contextualising what is that other people say, or why it is they say it.

In this case, I don't need to. When I was a little younger, the people I knew, gay and straight alike, used to tease me in a chiding-but-amused manner about being an unaggressive homophobe; I frequently lamented the nature of what I saw as my kind, and worried too about what it meant that after first having found myself to be different amongst straight folk, that I was also different from the ones with which I had hoped to identify.

In hindsight, I can see clearly that this was not a case of self-loathing, but a function of my having come across only the stereotypes that you refer to. That is, people who don't live like I do, whether gay or straight. Prior to this, the only gay people I knew were friends of my mother, and they are all non-promiscuous, longterm couples, so once I started to make my own friends, my thinking was that such folk must be virtually non-existant in the natural setting. In this respect, we have both been in the same places at one time or the other.

Where I have been fortunate is in having lived in perhaps the most cosmopolitan of all cities in the world (if anyone tries to suggest New York to me, I wince at their skills of perception), though I too did grow up in Asia. London is a smelting pot for all peoples, and in this forum I have met dozens of gay people who think like I do, or have gotten over the live-fast routine that you speak of. I have come to realise, and it has taken time, that while there are plenty of the first kind, there are an equal number of the second. They're just difficult to find because they don't move in the same circles, and don't demand so much attention from others.

I've also come past what, I guess, was really a prejudice; now that I see what exists, the extreme hedonists don't affect me in the way that they used to, though I sometimes feel a little bemused at how society thinks of gay folk as all being like this. Not my problem, something society needs to grow past. And hey, I love dancing with friends so much that we do go to clubs, and chances are that any onlooker would be unable to tell the difference between me and anyone else on the dance floor, be they angelic or devilish in mien. Frankly, that's how it should be; I have faith in people, as I've said before, and not to the point of naïveté, but within the bounds of fairness and of reason.

On that note, I must differ with regard to the point you make about the inevitability of the social circles in which same-sex couples will move, for obvious reasons. In a place like this, there is no stopping anyone from surrounding themselves with likeminded people, and most of my friends - predominantly straight, but many gay - are of the kind that I trust, often implicitly. Bear in mind, too, that a little contrast is not a bad thing when growing up; my father had friends whom I disliked as a child - I value having been given the chance to differentiate between people, rather than having my world rendered in one shade of gray for me.

It interests me to know what nationality you are. I realise that you are protecting yourself, but you won't give much away in stating this here, as it has no bearing upon where you live or who you are (in the broad sense).

Good to have you onboard - and do tell me if the site looks funny anywhere; I don't use Internet Explorer as it is now a non-compliant browser (they've pulled out of certain web-agreements), so it is difficult to know where this dying leviathan goes wrong in rendering my CSS laden pages. Cheers!

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Amendment: May 9 2003 05:56 PM

Don't feel pressured to volunteer the above; I can probably say with confidence that I know where you're from in any case. It must certainly affect your outlook on things.

I wish I've had the opportunity to have seen the things that you've had. But I'm afraid that that's a little out of the question for me. But in not belabouring the point, I guess that we shall have to agree to disagree on certain points, though at the core we both subscribe to some of the same concepts; that the cases really are too individual to be judged with a single bright red pen stroke.

Like I've said before, my sample is small and thus must be skewed. As for my parents having same sex couples as friends? The thought is so ludricrous I end up laughing. My mom once told me point blank after watching a television show with gay characters in it that she would disown any of her children that were gay. Sigh.

As for IE, I'm afraid that I don't use it very often. I use Mozilla for the same reason that you don't use IE. But I did pop open IE to check, and it seems fine to me. I've had problems with CSS and IE before, so I understand your frustration with it.

As for my country (I'm assuming you looked up my IP address or checked your list of referral countries - naughty ;) ), it really isn't as bad as all that... as long as you keep your head down and out of sight. *shrug* You learn to live with it.

I'm still hesitant about saying too much about myself until I know you better (does that make any sense?), but I think it's safe to tell you that I'm younger than you by two years, I'm in college and I live discreetly. I party, but I avoid relationships. Too much to lose. It truly sucks living where I live sometimes. *shrug*

Note: And while I do have gay friends, they don't know about me. Fun eh?

*drily* Congratulations, I think I've pseudo-outed myself in your comments section */drily*

The words of Louis Armstrong spring to mind, and it's really not a cliché; you do have plenty of time ahead.

I do realise that I've been lucky on several fronts, not least my family; parents who are both the most liberal members of their own siblings - my relatives - and great siblings of my own. I know from some that I care about that not having this kind of familial support can be soul destroying, but these people have been built to last, as will you. I take none of what I have for granted; it has made the few harrowing experiences I've had that much more bearable.

Actually, no, I'm not playing sleuth; about once a week, I check my domain and sub-domain statistics. AWstats includes country flags for the IPs, so given how low my traffic is, it isn't hard to spot the obvious ones, being anything other than the UK, US, and Germany. I've spent plenty of time in your neck of the woods; our family lived there for a time too.

As I said, I too grew up in Asia, in a couple of countries, but the majority of it in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where being gay is technically not legal, but not much persecuted in the same way that it is elsewhere; the multi-ethnic background of Malaysia makes it a little more tolerant than more homogenised societies.

Yes, congratulations to you; it's still effectively anonymous, but little steps aren't so bad. Just keep it online for the timebeing and, rest assured, there's no need to reiterate it or go any further either :)

Have a pleasant weekend.

You too. But a question though, it just struck me, you are/were a homophobe? *raised eyebrow*

Ha, I almost spat out my cereal! No, no, no - it's something that one or two of my friends used to tease me with because they knew full well that I wasn't one. It was a passing joke what with my disappointment in what I perceived incorrectly as being 'all there was'.

I could never be a homophobe; when I was six or seven, I was aware of the fact that one or two of my mother's close friends were part of same-sex couples, but it didn't occur to me then that this was not the norm. I loved, and still love, these people like an extended family; there was no time in my youth wherein I could have picked up any prejudicial feelings toward gay men and women. That is, unless my prejudices can be biased in their favour.