(no subject)
The man in the middle of that picture is a man named Fred Phelps ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Phelps ). Some of you may be familiar with the name, he made big headlines a few years go when he and his church went to Wyoming and protested the funeral of Matthew Shepherd (sp). He's from Topeka, Kansas, the very same town that I was born and raised in for the first 11 years of my life, and not a week passed where I didn't see that man and his followers standing outside of Gage Park, which is on the west end of the city, the "nice" part. And it was fairly nice, it was this huge park that tons of kids went to every weekend to fuck around and, well, be a kid in. There's a working mini-train that runs around it's perimeter that's been driven by the same conductor since before I was born, but I never got his name, because he's older than time and scared the shit out of me. He's still driving the train, I saw him last summer when my mother and I took my brother, Tyler, there.
Anway, so Fred and his parishoners would stand outside of the gates leading into Gage with the kind of signs that he's holding above and ones that are far more crass, with flames and ones claiming that "AIDS IS THE CURE FOR FAGS", etc., etc. I had no idea what that meant when I was that young, I knew it was bad because everyone in the car would go silent and immediately look forward. My mother was and still isn't very sympathetic towards gays, however she did feel it to be inappropriate, which she does earn half of a point for. My father's side of the family, on the other hand, would put their middle fingers to the windows and maybe say something out of the window if it was that kind of day for them, but it rarely was, and they rarely ever came to Topeka to see me.
Not too much later aftear leaving Kansas for Mississippi, I figured out what those signs meant when I started to identify with what they called a fag and all of that business. I was terrified. I was terrified for my dad, who had been in a monogamous relationship with another man since I was 2-3 years old, and sexual orientation was the last thing on my mind then. It was in the front of my mind now, however, and living in the middle of the bible belt, you learn to keep that shit in check or else you'll be ostracized to the utmost extreme. I was, for the most part, because those kids could tell something was different about me, even before I really knew what it was. They made fun of my "yankee" accent, curly hair, "funny" voice, horrendous acne, and my hispanic heritage. If I wasn't scared shitless of them showing up to school with the same signs that Fred had, I would have stood up for myself.
So thank you, Fred Phelps, for being one of the most evil and dispicable men on this planet in the 21st century. In case you're wondering what he's up to now, he's branced out from boycotting fags, and is now boycotting funerals of our fallen military officers in Iraq.