Religion, Race and Homophobia - why I am what I am.

I realise several of my rants have been on Religion and Homophobia and no doubt several more will be too. So I wanted to paint a scene for you to help you understand my perspective.

Let's step back in time to 1910 or so. My Great-Grandfather Joseph Ashby, left Barbados and worked his passage over to the UK on a merchant navy ship. I know very little about him other than a few facts, he had a sister called Frances I think and when my Great-Uncle went to Barbados to track his father's family armed with the same scant information, the locals laughed at him - Ashby, having been a plantation owner's name, was as common a surname in Barbados as Smith was in England, and in the large Catholic community, the names Frances and Joseph were common too. What we do know however, was that by the standards of the day he was considerably older than the wife he married soon after, my Great-Gran and that he was black. These two things at this time would have singled the newlyweds out as different from the norm. Not that mixed marriages were illegal (unlike the US at this time), but they were far from commonplace. My Great-Grandfather died during the second world war and my Great-Gran was always elusive with the details of their marriage and courtship providing some speculation regarding her age at the time - marriage at that time was illegal for anyone under 21 without parental consent.

Fast forward sixty years and my Father married my Mother in similar circumstances regarding his race. In the early 70's there was no mixed-race with all it's PC inclusivity- you were either 'colored' or white - one of them or one of us. My Mother tells a story of going to her mother and sitting her down to hear the news that she was dating someone, that it was serious and that he was black. Her reaction was one of horror, horror that my Mum thought his race would ever be an issue for her mother, but it could have easily been a different kind of horror altogether. Nowadays, you look at my Father and like his father before him, he's paled with age, his hair is greying and less afro-looking and yet when you look at his photos from the 70's there he is looking like a young John Conteh (pic). As a child I remember school kids asking me why I had a 'nigger nose', why my Dad was black and my Mother white. Asking 'what did that make me' and determining me a 'half breed'. My sister had it worse. Like my dad and I, she had the full shaped lips which at the time she had yet to grow into and for which she would suffer merciless taunts from the kids at school - but to complicate matters further, unlike me Emma's skin was a dark olive, she tans to this day a very deep bronze brown colour - although now of course she is the envy of her peers - and had long, black, silky and perfectly straight hair. To the kids on our council estate and at school she could be only one thing: a paki.

So from a race perspective, we were an odd lot. My Mum, the standard anglo saxon, fair skinned woman; her tall, 'colored', afro haired husband; her painfully camp, fair skinned, big lipped, nig nosed and afro'd son (old women would want to pat my hair in supermarkets like I was a poodle - I would die of quiet rage and shame); and her daughter, the dark skinned Paki with lips too full to be 'from raand 'ere'. Admittedly by the time our fair skinned, blonde haired, perfectly anglo featured sister came along and was old enough to be going to school, things had changed for the better with our schools having a wider range of people from various ethnicities so less people commented on our varied appearances. They just assumed we had different fathers. My poor Mother.

We went to a Catholic school where we were indoctrinated with the right way to think, pray and behave. The education was a good one. The bashing's from kids from the protestant state school on the way home? Not so good. I remember walking home alone wondering whether my bashing today would be because I was a poof (I never really quite understood what it meant - I was attracted to boys alright, but never quite realized that THAT was what they were talking about), or whether it would be the Catholic me or the Half Breed me that would win out and earn the beating that might be lurking round the corner.

So I got it from all angles. I know what it's like to face prejudice because of racism. Don't get me wrong, I never suffered like Emma suffered and I certainly didn't do it with the stoicism of my sister, but I've been there. And I've had plenty of experiences of homophobia - from the school 'friend' turning on me outside a club when I was 17, trying to impress his girlfriend who had also once been a school friend - (thanks Anthony Mills and Anna Green - she held his coat), to the jumping on Oxford Street of four geezers on three defenceless 'batty boys' - not quite so defenceless as it happens; I'd had less to drink than they had and more than held my own- when I was 24. There've been plenty more and there probably will be again.

I've also suffered the religious dogma of institutionalised religion - it's quite something when a 12 year old boy announces he's joining the priesthood to save his soul from the temptations he's experiencing as a gay adolescent - the terror, the futility, the sense of abandonment that god must think you so low as to curse you with this torture. Mercifully I came to my senses - thank you Ms. Nevins for instructing me on the orthodoxy of Catholicism - it's all original sin and no original thought, just borrowings of older religions.

And there you have it, some of the things that led me to my current state of being, a rabidly Atheist (I like to say I'm religious in my Atheism), white identified (white people identify me as white, black people often question otherwise and only black women ever mention it, but as much as I'd like to be a brutha, I'm as honky as they come), homosexual. Faggot. Gender Bender. Shirt Lifter. Queer. Batty Man. Arse Bandit. Uphill Gardner (you have to love the Welsh sense of humour). I embrace them all. I know who I am. You can use these words too, if you feel comfortable with them. But trust me, if I'm uncomfortable with you using them because I think you mean offence, you'll know about it.