A Friend's Tragedy

Back in the days when I was active on Orkut, I had a friend - a New Zealander of French extraction (those of my contacts who were active along with me on Orkut at the time will know who I am talking about). She was in her late thirties, beautiful, articulate, with a tart sense of humour, extremely intelligent, and an out and out career woman.

She was also, she admitted, a virgin. Since there was nothing wrong with her looks or her personality, I thought, you know, it was just "one of those things". There was something wrong with her, though, that we didn't know of at the time.

Back when she was a teenager, this woman had fallen into a river, been drowned and revived twice from clinical death in the space of an hour, and afterwards her life had been punctuated by blackouts and health breakdowns. She wore  an emergency locket which, in theory, would summon an ambulance when she hit it. Well, in late 2005, she finally had a stroke which killed her so quickly she didn't ever have a chance to hit it.

It was traumatic, of course, for those of us who had known her, but not until I had an exchange of e-mails with her uncle did I know exactlyhow tragic that whole thing had been.

You see, this lady hadn't been frigid or something. Nor did her health problems come in the way of her libido. The problem was much more simple and from her viewpoint terrible.

She was a lesbian.

So what? I can hear you asking. Isn't that so common nowadays that it no longer signifies?

Not quite, because our friend was also a Catholic from her childhood. She had been conditioned to believe (and her revival from clinical death must have reinforced her belief) in the doctrines of the Catholic Church, among which one is, of course, that homosexuality is unnatural and evil. This is something the Catholic Church avers to this day.

So our friend had gone through life unable to find any outlet for her sexuality, having no desire for heterosexual intercourse and unable because of her conditioning to surrender to her needs with other women. It might not have been so bad if she had been a stupid person; but of course she wasn't. She was extremely intelligent and I'm quite sure that she must have suffered even more because she must have known, intellectually, that there was nothing wrong in consensual sex with another woman but have been unable to get through her own early indoctrination. I think that's what made her such a driven career woman, and it may well have hastened her death.

Can you imagine what this poor, beautiful, clever, humorous woman must have gone through, having to remain without any form of sexual release all through her life - and all because of the pronouncements of a bunch of old men so hypocritical that they made no effort to stop paedophiles from filling their own ranks?

It's just another personal tragedy that the church will never have to answer for.