Born-Again David Gardner??

[Guest zipperzone]

RE: From David Gartner - to clear the air

 

>Ah, the glamorous life of a young gay escort. Drugs,

>attempted suicide, visits to the mental ward, casual affairs

>with other fucked-up kids, poverty, the embarrassment of

>having one's family find out . . . who wouldn't be envious?

>

 

I'm kinda with you on this one Woody. My parents taught me that envy and jealousy were no,nos - but it's kinda hard not to be just a teensy bit envious when you point out all I am missing.

 

And in addition, being an escort who displays all these attributes, gives him the right to dump all over others who may disagree with your position. How good it must be...........

[DavidGartner]

RE: From David Gartner - to clear the air

 

Hey everyone,

 

Well actually I never escorted to pay for my drug use. I made more then enough to pay for it and I generally got it for free. I did it because it was kinda a way for me to socialize... When I did it I had people hang out and keep me company etc. I realized at some point that it was a desperate cry for help. I was doing it to myself to see who cared about me.. how far would I have to go before someone said something to me... how far over the edge... but I realized.. no one cared about me except the Lord and he helped me so I helped myself in return as I KNEW he wanted me to do something else with my life. I will ask you all that own a Bible to Read " 1 Samuel 18 - 1 Samuel 20* It speaks of David ( David and Goliath ) and of Jonathon ( King Sauls son ) and how Jonathon came to love him as much as he loved himself. It also says Jonathon and him were kissing and then when Jonathon got slain in battle... David had stated that Jonathons Love for him was even greater then that for a women.. I think that they were gay and that the historians that wrote the bible didnt want to make David sound bad as he was a hero. and that whoever wrote the part about being gay was wrong must have been a homophob anyways thats my imput for now

 

Love and Respect

 

Matty

[bigguyinpasadena]

RE: From David Gartner - to clear the air

 

David,I always thought your posts came from the viewpoint of a spoiled brat.

Now I see you were fighting lots of demons and that your self indulgent bratty tone was just a defense mechanism,one of many I would bet.

Good luck in getting your house in order and in finding a nondestructive path to travel in your life.

Please don't get preachy with the"working boys"on this board,they are traveling a path of discovery also,and are doing their best to make a way for themselves in this world.They do not need to be judged.Keeping your own house in order will be a full time job for you for quite a while.

And I would also suggest turning away from this board altogether if you truly want to get out of hustling.I do not belive in equating sex workers or homosexuals with drug addicts or alcoholics.It is true that a person might turn to prostitution on occasin to finance an addiction.But just as not all addicts/drunks are hookers,so it is that not all hookers are addicts/drunks.

However,if you truly want to make a break with your past,then visiting this site will not be beneficial.

Jamaica would be one of the last places I,as a gay man,would seek sanctuary in.But you are with family,and I hope they are good to you,and accept you for YOUR personal potential,and are not trying to mold you into the man that THEY think you should be.

You have had a rather wild youth,cherish it but move on.It is time to go on to the next stage of your life.

Best wishes to you,

[Guest ReturnOfS]

RE: From David Gartner - to clear the air

 

Hey Matty aka David J

 

I’ll be brief.

 

First, I wish you luck on getting your life back in order.

 

Second, I want to say that I agree with most of bigguyinpasadena’s advice for you, especially the part about staying away from this site for a while. “However, if you truly want to make a break with your past, then visiting this site will not be beneficial”.

 

Also, much has been written about how homosexuality and Christianity aren’t mutually exclusive. One book that I recommend is What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality by Daniel A. Helminiak.

 

I have included some useful links below. Take care.

 

http://www.gayxjw.org/bible.html

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/188636009X/002-4586660-7186453?v=glance

http://www.stonewallrevisited.com/issues/marco2.html

 

Now someone please post some more pics of cute guys in the lounge. LOL

 

:9

[AdamSmith]

RE: From David Gartner - to clear the air

 

>Also, much has been written about how homosexuality and

>Christianity aren’t mutually exclusive. One book that I

>recommend is What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality by

>Daniel A. Helminiak.

>

>I have included some useful links below. Take care.

>

>http://www.gayxjw.org/bible.html

>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/188636009X/002-4586660-7186453?v=glance

>http://www.stonewallrevisited.com/issues/marco2.html

 

Another humane, affirming source is The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart by Peter J. Gomes, a professor of Christian morals and pastor of Memorial Church at Harvard.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060088303/qid=1091406295/sr=ka-1/ref=pd_ka_1/002-2973211-8080836

 

Some remarks by Gomes in a public forum on homophobia:

 

"It falls to me as a Christian minister and a practitioner of religion to indicate that in the matter of sexual prejudice, religion is fundamentally a part of the problem and one can only hope that by acknowledging that, it may well indeed become part of the solution as well. Perhaps the one thing that my profession and yours have in common is that we have a great deal to answer for in the question of this prejudice which we are confronting today.

 

"I have been asked to talk about the religious basis of prejudice... I will begin by saying that religion, by its nature, consists of the allocation of strong convictions. It is therefore deeply engaged in the acts of definition, and definition -- as you know perhaps better than anybody else -- is both a self-describing enterprise and a self-excluding enterprise, an exclusionary process by which the one is defined against the other. Therefore, religion has inherently within it a stake as it were in setting its adherents apart from other people and determining the basis of acceptable discriminations.

 

"When I look at what religion in general, and the Protestant Christian Religion, which is the cultural religion of this country, in particular, have had to do with the definition of acceptable prejudices, I have to conclude straightaway that the record is a sorry one, an unfortunate one, indeed an unhappy one. Going back to the landing of the Pilgrims in my native Plymouth, Massachusetts where H. L. Lincoln said, "Upon landing at Plymouth Rock, the Pilgrims first fell upon their knees and then upon the aborigines, all and both of course in the Name of God." Deep convictions, clear identities, have inherent in them, strong prejudices.

 

"The question is whether those prejudices are ultimately destructive or in some sense can be described as constructive. Now, when I look at the religious landscape and try to ask what, in my own experience, was the origin of some of the most profound social prejudices in our country, I have to revert to that wonderful Christian Sunday School hymn with which most Protestants at least were brought up: "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong, they are weak, but he is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me, yes, Jesus loves me, yes, Jesus loves me! How do I know? The Bible tells me so." Well, Protestantism is based on the conviction that the Bible tells me all that I need to know, and only what I need to know.

 

"When anyone looks at the record of our religious treatment of the other in the culture, we find that the first and the last resort used to justify a prejudice is the fact that the Bible tells me so. In my book, 'The Good Book,' I tried to take the hard cases in which this principle was illustrated by looking progressively at the religious treatment of women, for example. All of the subordinate and repressive images with a religious sanction against women had arrived from a particular way of reading Scripture, whether it goes to the notion of that wanton disobedient woman, Eve, who ate us out of house and home as it were, or through the images of the Blessed Virgin and ever docile and faithfully obedient Mary who cancelled out Eve’s sin by doing as she was told. Somehow, these images, together with the reading of various Pauline cultural texts as normative provided the basis for centuries of subordination of woman. When reason and decency and logic and ethics all defied such treatment, the last resort of the devout like the last resort of the scoundrel, was of course the Bible.

 

"This is also true in the Christian original sin, as I call it, of anti-Semitism. The great irony is that God, who chose to manifest himself in the form of a Jewish baby to a Jewish mother in a Jewish world and whose people are by acclamation regarded as the chosen people, is understood as now being removed from the particular setting of Judaism. Therefore, Christians by their super-sessionist principles have a right in some sense, an almost constitutional right, to despise Jews. That terrible inheritance, which is documented in Daniel Goldhagen’s book, 'Hitler’s Willing Executioners,' indicates that it was not just good Germans obeying Nazi orders, but centuries of Christian anti-Semitism which literally got into the water supply and contributed to a climate, permitting if you will, anti-Semitism to be seen as not at all incompatible with the Christian faith...

 

"The last place where such a prejudice is permitted, so it seems for the same reasons as all of the others have been permitted, is in the question of sexual identity and sexual orientation. It was to this that I turned my attention in my book and have turned my attention in recent years, because I concluded, on the basis of outbreaks of anti-homosexual hysteria in the last five to seven years, that there had to be a sufficiently grounded prejudice to sustain all of the social criticism that would surround such antediluvian points of view as we have seen wherever the issue has come up.

 

"The last and the first resort of the bigot in these cases is the sanctified sanction of religion. If we say the Bible tells me so in our religiously saturated culture, there appears to be no card, no hand, that can trump that particular card or that particular hand. Therefore, it seemed important to me to argue this case from within the religious circle rather than to articulate secularist ideas on the outside, throwing bricks at the ecclesiastical house of glass. It is within communities of faith, it is within communities of religious conviction that the last prejudice really has to be addressed, because the people who hold such a prejudice on religious grounds will not respond to, or listen to, any other basis for the critique of their points of view or of their practices. Now I hasten to say that in my opinion the Bible does not create prejudice, but it does confirm prejudices that already exist if you wish them to do so. It was Francis Bacon, I believe, who said that anyone, including the devil, can find the text for his own behavior and his own predilection.

 

"The fact that the Bible is not a systematic handbook of philosophy or even of religion, but an enormous library means that if you are a clever browser, you will certainly be able to find almost anything to support your particular enterprise. The real issue is not what can be found in the Bible, but what the biblical principles are that allow us not only to read the Bible intelligently, but to live our lives faithfully as religious people. It comes to me, not as an original thought but as a thought that needs to be amplified, that we do not read the Bible in terms of trying to find social precedent or even to justify social practice. What we do try to find in the Bible are those overriding principles that hold together otherwise unresolved and even contradictory social notions.

 

"On the one hand, principles that imply the cheapening of life as it is seen in the subjugation and derogation of women, or the destruction of the enemy, or in such things as polygamy, slavery and social peonage and, on the other hand, those principles by which slaves are set free, by which all are understood to be part of God’s intended design and of God’s new creation in both Hebrew and Christian scriptures and by which identity is formed in the ultimate of blessed relationship we are created in the image of God. If we want to know what God looks like, we therefore have to look at one another in order to get something of that picture and that means that God looks like the woman, God looks like the black, God looks like the homosexual, God looks like any and all of us.

 

"It is a frightening notion and a frightening enterprise and it is no surprise, or should not be any surprise that deeply convicted religious people tend by and large to be socially conservative people, people whose vocation depends upon establishing absolute and other exclusive distinctions. They like the status quo. They will do everything in their power either to preserve it or to return to it, sometimes at the point of a gun and often times through both polemic and subtle forms of intimidation. I have come to the conclusion that, at least for people like myself who are practicing religious people, the way to function within the communities of faith is to address the contradiction, the disconnect, as we now like to say, between profession of principle on the one hand and grievous practice and violation of their principle on the other hand and to do so not simply with a wagging of the moral finger, but by pointing to the moral high ground which the Bible and all of our religious traditions affirm.

 

"When Jesus is asked what is the summary of the law, he does not give doctrinal answers. He does not say he wants to believe certain things. He does not offer half of the rationale that the most Orthodox Christians and the most rabid fundamentalists offer. Jesus answers that question very simply: you shall love the Lord, thy God, with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. On these two, says Jesus, hang all the laws of the prophets.

 

"The ethical conviction begins with the affirmation of that principle, and from it all else is derived. We have watched in our own lifetime, you and I, each of the walls of prejudice assaulted and brought low. We have watched the prejudice against women addressed and transformed; the same against Jews, and the same against racial minorities. Logic suggests that this last prejudice will meet that same fate. It will meet it with the same combination, in my opinion, of consistent moral rigor, social outrage, political seriousness, and an appeal ultimately to moral and social conscience. It will happen, we have seen it happen before, and I believe that we are seeing it happen now.

 

"The fact that these dreadful, horrific exercises of intolerance and violence, such as the death of Matthew Shepard a few months ago, indicate not the strength of the opposition to a revised view, but the sense that there is an inevitability about it, which makes those who do not wish to see it happen all the more perverse, all the more violent, and all the more determined to stop what they regard in some respects as an inevitable movement. I conclude, therefore, that while religion and, I might add, psychoanalysis have a lot to answer for, they also have a very important role to play in what is nothing less than the transformation of social attitudes and the climate which we construct for honorable men and women and young people to live in. I conclude that it is never too late -- never too late to change one’s mind as you and I have done all the time. It is never too late to change one’s heart, whereby we encourage and encounter the varieties of social and religious conviction, and it is certainly never too late to change our habits. We change them all the time. When you think of the state of racial relations in this country as recently as 25 years ago, and remember when people said you cannot change hearts by legislation, I stand to tell you that you jolly well can, and that the country and the culture is the better for those changes. The last place in which those changes should take place is the subject which is before us today."

 

http://www.cyberpsych.org/homophobia/noframes/gomes.htm

[Guest rohale]

RE: From David Gartner - to clear the air

 

Matt,

 

This probably may not mean much. I for one am glad you've found salvation with Christ. It can be a very tough world to live in at times and especially for those who have problems, life can be unbearable at times. I've known some people in my personal who accepted god, but then treat faith as a convenience. Sort of like a hotel, check in with god one day, check out the next day. A selfless revolving door policy. After some time passes, then return to religion when something bad happens and in the process behave as though nothing went wrong in the first place.

 

About a week ago, I spent time with a really special person whom I used to date back in college. In recent months, she accepted Christ into her heart. Like yourself, she's had to deal with her own demons and her situation is somewhat similar to yours. Right now, she's very focued on making herself a better human being. She's in a good place in her life. I'm happy for likes of herself and yourself Matt. From an intellectual point of view, I can to a certain degree understand what it must be like to find faith. However from an emotional perspective I couldn't possibly grasp what that feeling must be like for you to finally be allowed the healing of the heart. Also to have that personal relationship with god. You should feel really proud of yourself.

 

Matt, I hope you make it through law school and more than anything else I wish you the best of success in what lies up ahead for you. Keep the good fight for your spirit going and never give up on life. Good luck to you Matty.

 

Rohale