Dearest Reader,

To jump straight past small talk…

(Although I do hope you are well and the weather?! I know right…?)

I must clear up once and for good, homosexuality is not a ‘lifestyle’choice .

(A deeply ignorant man offended me of late, so much so on this very matter, that I felt the need to write this open letter)

Let me keep things simple.

Becoming a catholic is a lifestyle choice, choosing a night shift job in security is a lifestyle choice and being a swinger is a lifestyle choice.

You have control over the decision that you make and this allows you to become or unbecome that which you choose to become.

You choose.

(Should you not choose and be cajoled under duress into any of these ‘choices’ then that does not negate their nature as choices. They remain choices as they are alterable. )

Having blue eyes, being tall or being unable to grow a full beard (a follicle tour-de-force that would invariably make all the ladies swoon) by the age of 34 are not lifestyle choices. These are natural, unalterable, realities.

(Note: Yes they are in a material sense sometimes ‘alterable’ and you can ‘choose’ to deform what you have, to create another instance of yourself. However, unlike choices, realities are something you struggle to unbecome as they are pre-prefixed, sometimes cruelly so. The only really alterable aspects of our reality remain on the material plane, thereby not accounting for who we truly are; which transcends this fixed, worlds view)

Does a heterosexual man question his heterosexuality?

Is he ever told that he has chosen to be ‘straight’?

Therefore, Should a homosexual be forced to do so?

If homosexuality is a choice, then surely so is heterosexuality?

This is a simple matter of logic. Both are sexual orientations.

So does one choose to be straight?

If no, then neither does a homosexual choose to be gay.

Peace.

Eli.

(Photos – Eli Woodbine, Amsterdam, 2016)