“ First they ignore
you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you…then you win”
Mahatma Gandhi
This famous quote from Gandhi seems to aptly sum up our LGBT history
as society’s forbidden fruits. If you
Google the word fruit and then add ‘slang’ to the search the Wikipedia post is
quite worth the read. The word “fruit” as derogative slang for LGBT folks has a
long rather bizarre and cruel if not at times a hilarious history. In the spirit of making these stories
personal tales I won’t go into much of what is said about the word except for
one example that is simply too delicious to not share.
Believe it or not the Canadian Civil Service used what they
called the “Fruit Machine” to detect infiltrating queers especially into the
Canadian Mounties. The “machine” would often consist of exposing recruits to
erotic male imagery or sexually charged homoerotic words and then attempt to
measure the response of prospective candidates. I think it was just nervous
twitching, sweating and flushing responses and that electrodes were not hooked
up to a penis. This ‘fruit machine’ was actually in use from 1950-1973!
It would be egotiscal thinking on my part to try and remember
when I was someone else’s ‘forbidden fruit’. I suppose though that I might have
fit that bill somewhat in the 1970’s when married men looking for a quick
noon-hour fuck pursued me at least for a few hours at the bathes. I was
certainly forbidden to them and definitely a fruit.
For me personally my tastes in forbidden fruit-like things of
a sexual nature have always drifted toward the leather and S/M scenes but I
must say I have only nibbled at the edges around those communities. I was
certainly headed that way in the early 1980’s but that whole HIV thing kind of
slowed new avenues of sexual exploration for me. Though I suspect I could be
easily seduced even today with the promise of some creative verbal abuse and a
good ass whipping, pretty vanilla I know but I am still a novice in this area
of ‘forbidden fruit’.
To shift gears here rather rapidly I read a piece recently
from the British journal The Spectator
where a London Physician, rather provocatively I suppose, said that he would
these days rather have HIV than diabetes. I think he was actually serious and
gave several examples of how well controlled HIV was actually less of a health
threat that diabetes which he described as not only a chronic but also a
progressive illness. His point overall being that HIV alone is now considered
to simply be chronic and not progressive or interfering with living a normal
lifespan. For the record I do not believe that Type 2 diabetes is necessarily progressive
either.
So what the hell you may ask is the rather loose association
I am making with forbidden fruit. Well, and bare with me here, I find it very
personally ironic and quite unjust that I am now looking at pre-diabetes with a
recent HbA1c of 6.0. That mind you after well over thirty years of HIV
infection and the resulting metabolic derangement I lay mostly at the feet of
HIV meds, even as effective as they are at controlling the virus. As the
Grateful Dead so often sang, “if the thunder don’t get you the lightning will”.
So forbidden fruit for me has left the carnal realms of the flesh and moved
into actually eating fruit, or more accurately drinking fruit juice. Juice is now something forbidden if I want to
try and control the metabolic syndrome fueling my early diabetes with diet and
exercise rather than with medicines.
I have become in the past couple years even more of a
voracious reader of diet and diet theory related books. My heroes being many of
the leading vegans, Neil Barnard, Rip Esselstyn, T. Colin Campbell and some of
the less strident diet advocates such as Robert Lustig and Mark Hyman. All of
these authors, several being noted physicians, believe Type 2 diabetes is
reversible with diet and exercise. The diet they espouse of course is not
standard American fare and is full of forbidden items not just fruit juice.
Fruit juice, even fresh squeezed for example, has as much sugar as the same
amount of Coke or Pepsi. I needed to come to the realization that my pancreas
and liver don’t give a fuck where the sugar comes from. It is the same poisons
whether honey, high fructose corn syrup, Agave nectar or table sugar.
My personal guru around things diet these days is the aforementioned Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist from UCSF, whose excellent
book Fat Chance lays it all out in
plain English with of course rather long lists of the forbidden. His advice for
controlling metabolic syndrome and its evil sequelae can be summed-up easily: we
just need to eat real food. He suggests never buying anything with label on it.
Another of his pearls is that we have a choice in life, we can be fat or we can
fart. His reference to farting of course is related to the need for lots of
fiber in our diet, which only comes from real, unprocessed food.
So, for me now, in my mid-sixties, what have become forbidden
fruits are certainly much different than what they were in 1979. Ah, for the
simpler days when the choice was not between farting and unwanted visceral fat
but rather will it be an afternoon delight at the tubs or perhaps an evening
spent in a sling in the basement of dear friends.
© April 2014
I was
born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross
nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver,
Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have
currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco,
California.
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