Finally the opportunity I have waited for most of my life. I grew up in a Catholic neighborhood in St. Paul and was warned about the dangers of “queers” as gays were called then. I took that advice to heart. But the problem was that I was never given any way to identify gays.
I could pretty easily pick out the dangerous “black” population, the Irish weren’t too hard either but they posed less of a threat. Jewish people made it evident by their celebration of different religious holidays, but gays were an enigma. How could I identify them to protect myself?
Mostly I assumed that they were so small in numbers that all I had to do was to stay within my well-identified community of friends, surely none of them could be gay. This approach was shattered the first time someone identified a coworker as being gay. Apparently gays were so clandestine that normal observations would not identify them, I had to search for other clues.
Eventually I moved to Grand Marais with my wife (of course we are straight and God is on our side) only to hear that Grand Marais is home to “a lot of gay people”
That renewed my quest; the chance of actually seeing a gay in the wild in such a small community should be simple. I looked in the obvious places first, the “known” gay covers: art galleries, boutiques, the library and bookstores, to no avail, everyone in all those places looked just like all my straight friends.
Perhaps they disguised themselves as more ordinary people and I looked in the gas stations, grocery stores and the Co-op especially, but everyone looked normal. Restaurants, bike shops and outfitters and health clubs? Still nothing.
I had just about given up hope when Lloyd Geillinger wrote that the passage of the marriage equality act would cause a mass influx of gays from everywhere else in the universe, arriving in droves because of our “safe haven.” Even worse than being gay they were also Democrats!
Please Lloyd, and others who seem to know the difference, and the threat, take pictures or give me clues as to what to look for so I can protect my marriage of 48 years, so I can protect my grandchildren and the community from such vile creatures, and protect the state from these infidels and preserve the hypocrisy of the last 200 years of America that refused these fellow humans the same rights I have possessed from birth.
Jerry Hiniker
Grand Marais
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