World Aids Day – Safe Sex For Altar Boys

Safe Sex for Altar Boys sounds like a stupid title, controversial maybe and antagonistic. 

Please hear me out, I’m a sensible and compassionate man, and with deep regret, sadness and dismay I must tragically say that I was once an altar boy.  But  now the good news, I am still here, in good health and am still reasonably good looking and attractive to the visually impaired and women over sixty five.

In my case fortunately for me, aids arrived late on the scene, and although I served at the Catholic church, I have never had to spend agonising moments wondering whether I had caught the deadly bug that has kept the coffin makers busy for the last so many years. In those days in the sixties when I was abused by members of the clergy, aids was unheard of.  So whether it came from aliens, the evil lab somewhere in the Swiss Alps concocted by guys in lab coats with strong accents that replace the w’s with v’s like the bad guys in James Bond movies or whether it mutated from some other germy type of thing that only nerds would be able to accurately describe, is not of great importance to me because I still get to see the beauty of the sunrise. Well at least when I accidentally get woken by some sort of bird species scratching on the corrugated roof or my wife getting out of bed to contemplate her navel with the help of her self awareness mp3’s on her iPod, knitted blanket and a plie of objects that she walks into whilst trying to sneak incognito to another room.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t care for others, because I do and I’m prepared to put myself out there in the world to help make a difference and help protect altar boys.  It almost sounds crazy doesn’t it, but hear me out, I ain’t stoopid. Hear the chant “What do want, safe sex for altar boys?  When do we want it?  Now!

So even though I have been traumatised by the sexual abuse that happened to me as an altar boy, I haven’t had to worry that my unfortunate experiences in 1967 and 1968 had given me a sickening disease accompanied by some sort of death sentence handed over by fools that violated my innocence and the trust that was given them in the name of Jesus. 

When I look at something like a deadly sexually transmitted disease, I’m looking at other aspects that relate to it and not just the obvious.  In my digging around for reasons for any problem, I always look for the cause and not the effect; a bit like the way some Natural Health practitioners approach the healing of their clients, yeah I guess I sound a bit new agey but please note I will not mention the word Mayan or 2012 in this article.  And there is an underlying problem in our community, and it’s called sexual abuse of children.  This problem is causing numerous other imbalances.

On my journey of healing I’ve looked a lot at human nature, why people do things and when things are done, the deadly silence and the cover up.  This haunting silence and cover up is just as scary for me as aids because it’s very close to us, closer than you are probably willing to admit.  It is not something happening in the third world countries that we cringe at when we see it on the television, that’s if we watch documentaries instead of cop shows that usually start with a dead body, blood and trendy looking detectives.

This deadly silence helps to cover-up  the sexual abuse of children in the church, of which I am a victim of.  For men it is a very shameful thing to say they were once raped as a child by men, it is humilating and very confronting to our manhood.  This shame and fear that men like myself experience or have experienced is the very thing that has enabled the paedophiles hiding in the churches to not have to face the consequences of their insane actions.   But hey, men like me have balls because we stand up and say to people that child molesters got us but the more people like me that stand up to bring an awareness of it, the safer everyone else’s children will be.  They might have got my body, well really I was just eleven years old, that wasn’t much of a victory now was it but they never realized that I would scream loud in the years to come.  When one person speaks up, others wake up.

I’m astounded, my site has only been up for a couple of weeks and there are quite a number of women that have contacted me, wished me well and said that they had been raped or sexually abused in some way.  As a man I admire their courage and wish them love,  healing and a happy life ahead of them. 

People in the church do not have the courage to consider what has gone on behind closed doors for many years.  And in some cases it hasn’t even occurred to them that anyone in the church may betray their trust.  And it’s bewildering to me that those who know what goes on just do the sign of the cross and hope that it will go away, these people are pretty gutless. 

For a boy to have been violated by another male at a young age is very traumatic; and the effects of it are very hard for a man to shake off.  So I am breaking that deadly silence to help myself and am also making an effort to help other men restore their manhood in some way if they feel a little like I do; that’s what the Healing Trees is about.  I’m using a symbol to grow in strength, something to care for, and something more tactile.

So I’ll say it again very f***ing loud this time ‘Safe Sex for Altar Boys’ and that means when they are legally old enough to have consensual sex with someone they choose and not have to suffer the indignation that men like myself have experienced.

MAY GOOD MEN CLAIM BACK THE CHURCHES AND GET RID OF THOSE THAT ARE DANGEROUS TO THE COMMUNITY