Ramblings and Musings. . .

(pictured:  Andrew Sullivan in the '80s,  and below,  the late Allan Bloom:  a secret collusion?)   Just read the most fascinating idea on Lavender Wire ("we're here,  we're queer,  we're news junkies":  gotta love it.)  That Mormons,  in pushing Prop 8,  are using this manouver as a smokescreen to bring back polygamy.  The "one woman,  one man"  mantra may be the small opening,    in which they seek to drive the greatest wedge. It is a fascinating theory;  and brings to mind a smokescreen theory of my own;  or rather ,  one that more or less imposed itself on me:   I recall one night in the summer of 2003,  when my husband was still alive,  we were in our river home,  and Provincetown was still our "home away from home".  At that moment in August,  one could not turn on the news,  without seeing footage concerning gay marriage:  rallies,  sit-ins,  protests,  from both sides.  I had been re-reading Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal,  and was struck by something odd he had said.  "Gay marriage"  Sullivan mused,  "might come to inform heterosexual marriage,  by showing acceptance for some infidelity".  I had paused when I came upon the sentence,  but thought no more on it.  That night I smoked on the deck,  looking at the stars and the river,  while listening to Roxy Music ( Editions of You,  live,  marvelous)  and sipping a Smirnoff Ice.  Suddenly,  illumination leapt forth like lightening:  Sullivan's obsession with gay marriage was a smokescreen for something else. . . but what?  . . . the katydids chirped,  the heat was stifling. . . my brain worked feverishly. . . nothing. . . and then:  For male homosexual aristocracy.  The words rose unbidden, and with force.  But what sense did that make?  None;   none at all, that I could fathom. . . I called to my husband,  Andy ( still well then,  poor baby;  his last healthy summer)    and we discussed the idea at length.  But we could not really make heads nor tails of it.  It was forgotten. . . Fast forward to 3 summers later,  the summer of 2006.  Andy has been dead now for 5 months.  I am grieving,  and to handle that grief,  I read and read and read.  My son has been bringing home Lyndon LaRouche material.  I am not interested in it,  but I read it anyway.  Anything to block the pain, the memories.   The booklet is put out by the LaRouche Political Action Committee,  and is entitled,  of all things,  Children of Satan III:  Sexual Congress for Cultural Facism (!!!). . .  I come upon and essay about the late Alan Bloom,  author of the famous 80s text, The Closing of the American Mind.  I had read this book,  borrowed from the library,  in 2001,  and had loved it, and found it enormously absorbing and convincing.  And I recalled that Sullivan had been the greatest advocate of the text,  while he was still editor of The New Republic.  The LaRouche scholar's essay was well written,  and was delving into the section of Bloom's groundbreaking and vigorous defencse of the western canon in which Plato's Republic  was cited.  And here,  this LaRouche colleague was  suddenly concluding that Bloom's book had only been a smokescreen for " a gay male aristocracy"!  It was like a clap of thunder:  My train of thought from 3 summers prior,  had suddenly finished itself!