I wouldn't call myself homosexual having never had willing penetrative intercourse other than anal rape. Many years later I look back at the three boys who did it and hope that they repented and had good lives. When it happened, the victim was blamed as much as the assailants. The PTSD and Psychologists who drove surgical intervention were as much at fault as I am. Lately I am just sure that I would have done fine as a crossdresser. I did not know it at the time but the peculiarities of law mean that if I had not started living as a woman, I might be living in a tend or even dead. My income would be significantly less.
Looking at the Vietnam Debacle, I could have avoided all that by showing up in women's panties. Nothing is ever perfect is it?
Comments
Wow!
You just turning up in panties would have ended the Viet Nam war, wow!
Angharad
I suspect you are expressing
I suspect you are expressing the typical British sarcasm.
Given what I know about the social mores of the "Vietnam era", I suspect that showing up in panties would have meant instant disqualification from the draft for being a deviant. So it would have meant avoiding the personal hell of "serving" in Vietnam. But I am not sure of the alternative treatment many of the "draft dodgers" were subjected to, ranging from malicious outing to the community with the attendant social stigma all the way to incarceration in an insane asylum. That would be a different hell, but a hell non-the-less.
The folk song "Draft dodgers rag" by Pete Seeger come to mind. By the way, Pete Seeger was branded as a communist by the infamous McCarthy committee that "investigated" all kinds of "un-american" activities in that era and engaged in a witch hunt that oddly enough is reminiscent of the current Agent Orange.
But look what happened to Joe McCarthy
As an English lass, I am ill qualified to talk on the subject, and, I suspect that many here will be able to add more,but I do remember a history teacher at school saying that "McCarthy got his just desert, and died unloved and unshriven the fate of all bullies".
"Lately it occurs to me..
what a long strange trip its been."
Draft Dodger Rag...
...was written and sung by Phil Ochs. (Who joked at one concert that he'd been in Southeast Asia "entertaining the troops -- I won't say which troops" -- but never got called up.)
There was never any legitimate question, IMO, as to Pete Seeger's support of the United States; he served in the Army in WWII. Like many leftists in the labor movement, Seeger had been a communist before WWII, and he told at least one writer (in a 2006 book) that he didn't get out of the Party until 1949. It certainly was a witch hunt, going after "friends of friends" of suspected Communists in hopes of finding "fellow travelers", and years after the media blacklist had presumably ended, CBS reportedly tried unsuccessfully to make Seeger sign a loyalty oath before they'd let him sing a Vietnam protest song he'd written ("Waist Deep in the Big Muddy") on network television. Apparently it kept him off the air in 1967, but not in 1968.
(I have to disagree with your comparison to the investigations and indictments relating to Mr Trump. But that's another issue entirely.)
I'm not sure whether wearing women's panties would be enough to consider a person a deviant as opposed to a draft dodger -- might have depended on the part of the country where the exam was taking place, and the point in time.
Eric