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Tuesday 3 January 2023

SCOTTISH-AMERICAN LGBT HISTORY WITH PERSONAL AND CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVES (1981-2023)

 I'm planning to write a book on this topic with various collaborators from the LGBT community. Anybody interested?


                                                            



Hotel Washington, Madison 1996



Fire Island, Princes St Edinburgh 1980s


EXCERPTS:


CHAPTER 1: Coming out in Neo-Liberal Madison


According to Nikola Tesla, 1856-1943, Serbo-American inventor, business

tycoon, electrical and mechanical engineer, and idealist futurist:

A new world must be born, a world that would justify the sacrifices offered by humanity. This new world must be a world in which there shall be no exploitation of the weak by the strong, of the good by the evil; where there will be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich; where the products of intellect, science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life, and not the individuals for achieving wealth. This new world shall not be a world of the downtrodden and humiliated, but of free men and free nations, equal in dignity and respect.

Nikola Tesla may well have poured scorn on Tesla Inc, founded in his memory in San Carlos, California in 2009 by five profit-seeking co-founders. The international conglomerate has since exhibited some of the worst possible faces of global capitalism.

According to the since imprisoned white gay activist and anthropologist Walter L. Williams (The Spirit and the Flesh, Beacon Press, 1992 ): Native Americans have often held intersex, androgynous people, feminine males and masculine females in high esteem. Many Native Americans in history focused on their spiritual gifts. Even today, they tend to see a person's basic character as a reflection of their spirit. Since everything that exists is thought to seen as doubly blessed, having both the spirit of a man and the spirit of a woman. Thus, they are honoured for having two spirits, and are seen as more spiritually gifted than the typical masculine male or feminine female.


CHAPTER 2: COMING OUT IN POST-COLONIAL EDINBURGH

In T.M. Devine (2018),the capitalist historian and slave owner apologist, Professor Tom Devine of the University of Edinburgh describes how Scotland was cleared for Capitalism. The Scottish clearances saw thousands of cotters forced from their land in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Then urbanisation and industrialisation drove Scotland towards capitalist modernity.

The upheaval began in the Scottish borders in the seventeenth century, 100 years before crofters in the Highlands were first forced out to clear space for very profitable large-scale sheep and cattle farms.

Many people were dispossessed in the south, as well as in the north. Some Highlanders managed to retain some land, but total landlessness became the lived experience of the vast majority of people in the rural Lowlands. This was part of an extraordinary modernisation of southern Scotland which developed in the mid-eighteenth century and was essentially complete in the countryside by the 1840s.

Many of those removed went to meet the developing demands of the coalfields of northern England, and the industrial central belt of Scotland (large parts of which became effectively post-industrial by the end of the twentieth century). Hundreds of small townships and fermtoums were eliminated.






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