November 7, 1998 To the New York Post: After the death of Matthew Shepard, the Religious Right howled pointedly, that the climate of hate which not only made it possible, but inevitable, was being unfairly placed at their doorstep. If David Morrison believes he is further making that case, instead of proving it, by vilifying Shepard as a stereotypical degenerate homosexual male, by all means let him. Like the sight of Fred Phelps waving obscenities in front of Shepard's grieving family and friends, nothing can help our struggle more then that people see for themselves, the open sewer the religious right calls virtue. But it is not Morrison's obscene and gratuitous slander of Matthew Shepard I am writing you about. David Morrison describes the Gay community as if it were a culture preoccupied with brief barren assignations. It is a false image and, somewhere in that void his conscience has become, he knows it. There are sex sub cultures within the heterosexual and homosexual populations alike, just visit the red light district of any major city to see what the heterosexual version looks like. If this sub culture were all Morrison ever saw of what it was to be homosexual, his rhetoric might be excused as mere barnyard ignorance. But it is not. The Gay community he once walked in, before turning to the ex-gay movement was, and is, full of decent kindhearted and caring people, who work hard every day to make this a better world for all of us. He knows this, because he has seen it with his own eyes. The Gay and Lesbian people he once walked among, and called his friends, were not compulsive sex addicts prowling the public restrooms, but decent and hard working people who staffed and supported many community outreach programs, charities, and public works. The Gay people he knew, didn't seek out 'rough trade' in alleys and parks. They were mostly settled D.C. area couples of many years standing, who loved, and were devoted to one another. Many of the couples he once knew are together to this day. I know the Gay community that David Morrison saw with his own eyes. I know the Gay people he once walked among. I am one of them. In the late 1980's, well before the internet took center stage in the information revolution, amateur computer bulletin board systems once flourished. Many of these joined together in primitive computer networks, long before the internet became a buzzword. It was on one of these, the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau (GLIB), that I met Morrison, and watched him socialize with other Gay people. GLIB, unlike the crusingforsex web site Morrison cites as a typical example of how the Gay community uses the new information technology, was created to be a community news and information resource for Gay people, not a pickup board. David once contributed many news articles to it's extensive on line repository. In those days the members of GLIB were a kind of on line family, who met frequently in informal get-togethers, and who engaged one another in on line social chatter, and no few political debates. I still have many of those on line conversations with Morrison in my archives. When Morrison embraced a particularly conservative political ideology, he encountered no little resistance to his viewpoints on line. But as the Gay BBS network GLIB pioneered grew, he was far from the only conservative Gay man speaking out on line, and in the process no few liberal conceits were challenged, that needed challenging. He would know better then most, that the Gay community is diverse, and has many voices. One would have thought in those days, that he would settle in with the Log Cabin Republicans. But as time passed we watched in sadness and perplexity, as he left the political spectrum altogether, and took a seat in the kook pews. I still remember vividly a remark he made on line once, toward the end of his stay on GLIB, to the effect that as far as God was concerned, none of us were any better then Hitler. That he has now thrown himself into the ex-Gay movement is hardly a shock. In 1993 I'd have bet a years salary on it. But I'd have respected his right to do that, to live his own life, according to the dictates of his own concience, as best as he could. The shock, the anger and outrage I feel towards him now, is over his careless lies about a people he knows From First Hand Experience, resemble in no way the people he describes. Others may express their outrage at his obscene insinuation that Matthew Shepard was asking for what he got. Others can point out that the very dehumanizing rhetoric he now engages in is what created the climate of hate that makes murders like Matthew Shepard's inevitable. I am sickened beyond measure, to read Morrison lie about people he once called his friends, just so he can put a few more cigarette burns on Shepard's body. If this is what he calls virtue, then I can understand why he thinks God has such contempt for humanity. To reduce his friends to scarecrows that haunt public restrooms, to vilify the lives of people he once knew in the grotesque way he now does, after having shared our friendship and companionship for so many years, is a pathological denial of monstrous proportions. It is one thing to stand by your faith, to assert your belief that homosexuality is wrong by that faith, and another to so carelessly dehumanize people you once called your friends. Has Leviticus 18:22 nullified, finally, Exodus 20:16? For years I witnessed the disintegration of Morrison's personality, and now it's stomach churning to see his conscience has finally achieved free fall. I have said often, in many internet discussion forums, that the more the Religious Right makes an issue of virtue and morality, the more they make themselves look like a pack of gut stabbing thugs. Put David Morrison in the file marked, "case in point". -Bruce Garrett Cockeysville, Maryland.