It was wintertime somewhere in the Ozarks, in the days before the Soft Scape. A young boy named Timmy was born unto a poor family that already had one son. When that brother was killed in an accident, the parents boxed up all his possessions and hid them deep within the attic, not wishing to be reminded of his former existence. Some said that it was the only healthy option open to them, and some said that it was an ill-fitting tribute. In any case, Timmy barely even found out that he had had a brother, and any memories he developed of him were false. As Timmy grew, he sprouted hair, and learned to speak, and learned to pray. Every night, before going to sleep, he petitioned God, Please keep mommy and daddy safe. If he had had a brother still, he would have prayed for him too. The years went by, and Timmy went to school, and someone surprised him with the claim that he had once had a brother. He asked his parents about this when he got home, and they rather loudly instructed him not to discuss such things. He dropped the matter, but remained perplexed and afraid to ask any more questions. It was a long time before his explorations of the attic yielded the discovery that precipitated a great big scene. When his father saw that he had retrieved some of his brother's possessions, he beat him, and his mother screamed that if he ever went up to the attic again, she would cut off his pee-pee , and everyone was upset for quite some time. Mistaking this parental love for abuse, he drew away from them, and began to wander and drift. In the summer of his fifteenth year, he learned that love was a hobo's hand. Then, that winter, he left his parents' house for the last time. Finding himself overwhelmed by the eternal struggle for food and shelter, he started turning tricks for small change. This proved to be a dangerous occupation, and Timmy's life was rife with anxiety for quite some time. Presently, Timmy came to a little town, and in that little town lived a fireman and his wife. The fireman felt that it was time to experiment, and and inquired if Timmy would accomodate him. Timmy was more than happy to oblige for a reasonable fee, and the fireman was more than happy to continue to pay it. His wife was less than happy about the whole affair, for she felt that it reflected poorly on her as a woman, and she feared that if word got out, she would be the laughingstock of the town. Timmy was unconcerned with such issues. Some said that he was morally bankrupt, and some said that he was a practical businessman. In truth, though, the money became utterly unimportant to him, as he spiraled toward a psychotic breakdown. He had developed a fantasy wherein the fireman would leave his wife and take Timmy away, maybe to somewhere like Alabama, where no one would oppress them. As he obsessed and clung to this dream, he pulled farther away from reality and other human beings. The fireman was relatively unconcerned, but the fireman's wife grew more worried by subtle nuances that she noticed over time. You must stop this! she insisted. Give me my space! he insisted. The ongoing argument devolved into citations of marriage vows and Biblical passages, which were conveniently inconclusive. The fireman's wife was a God-fearing woman, and she knew that she could not violate 'til death do us part without being struck down, and that she could not invoke the old 'til death do us part loophole without violating thou shalt not kill and being likewise smitten. Thus she was at an impasse. Some said that she was a victim of a bad situation, and some said that it was her own fault for letting it happen. Timmy's relationship with God was much more complex, though now almost completely forgotten. He had also almost completely forgotten the existence of the fireman's wife, else he might have thought to plot against her. This memory lapse was abruptly corrected when the fireman's wife threatened Timmy. Timmy was upset and distraught and threatened her back. The fireman announced that he was tired of them both, and moved to Alabama on his own. Some said that it was irony, and some said that it was an owmen of things to come.

On homosexuality

Listening to some recordings of the Howard Stern show got me thinking about homosexuality. I try not to have any prejudices, so I tried to view this phenomenon from a purely logical point of view with as little external data as possible, so help me if I'm wrong.

Close relationships between two persons are generally understood to contain four separate components: sex, legal matters, social matters and romantic matters.

First of all it is said that, while the percentage of homosexual people is low, many heterosexual people have had some kind of homosexual experience either as an experimentation or as an accidental exposure. It also is believed that if the person in question is not physiologically repulsed by the concept (i.e. homofobic) then they can experience sexual pleasure regardless of the gender of the partner, number of partners or even absence of such. In all we can basically conclude that while homofobia is a sexual disorder (it disorders sexual function), homosexuality is not about sex at all.

The legal perspective is very inconclusive - in some parts of the world even having homosexual relationships can be illegal, but in other parts of the world homosexual marriages are not uncommon. Also all the legal stuff is there to help people that can not help themselves, especially minorities. So the legal part should be all for the equalising homosexuality to heterosexuality unless that does direct and irreparable harm to the society (which it seemingly does not).

From social perspective homosexual couples look to be living the life very similar to the heterosexual couples - there are some that are going wild and there are some that honour strong and stable relationships for decades and love to go to theatre. It could even seem that homosexual people tend to have a higher percentage of creative people and intellectuals.

The only think left is love. Call it a quick romantic encounter or a the love of the lifetime, but that seems to be the major descriptive difference with homosexually oriented people - they just fall in love with types of people that tend to be of same gender as themselves. It could be related to behavioural predispositions or differences in hormonal perception, but ultimately we do not know enough about love to fully understand that difference.

So at this point I can only conclude that until we understand all the hormonal processes and that "love" thingy, we could just as well start counting homosexual males and homosexual females as two additional genders that can not be fully understood by other two genders, just like men can not fully understand women and the other way around. This difference is as real and as effective as the difference between male and female genders or (stretching the analogy a bit too far) like the difference between races and should be honoured just as much as these differences are honoured.

And now I coin the terms "omale" and "ofmale" as the new homosexual male and female gender descriptors and "oman", "omen", "owman" and "owmen" as terms for single homosexual male, multiple homosexual males, single homosexual female and multiple homosexual females respectively.