LBGTQ haters should blame God for making LBGQT people

    Golf was my father’s game. He was good enough to be a professional golfer, but he preferred his father’s world of business. I only beat my father once, when I didn’t count all of my strokes.

    Played the old way, golf is a splendid metaphor for a spiritual life in which you don’t get mulligans, you play each shot as it lies, and you count all of your strokes. 

    I recently dreamt of my younger brother Major. He was in Key West and had a very

close-cropped full beard, which is in vogue with some men today. 

    When Major was a young man, he drove to San Francisco, California to start a new life. His traveling companion was a somewhat older, very talented gay artist and musician friend. I had introduced them to each other. The gay man returned to Birmingham, and Major lived and worked in California for a while.

    Then, Major lived in the Alta, Utah ski resort for a while.

    Then, Major came back to Birmingham for a while.

    Then, Major worked for T.G.I. Friday’s in Nashville for a while. 

    Then, Major moved to Key West, where he waited tables in a well known seafood restaurant for a while.

    Then, Major moved to St. Petersburg, where he found business backers and he built and opened a T.G.I. Friday’s knock off called Boneshakers. 

    After a while, Major moved back to Birmingham and enrolled in Samford University’s Cumberland Law School and met, dated and married the Alabama Women’s State Tennis Champion, who was a good friend of mine. Gail ran the Highland Racquet Club at the Highland Golf Course in Birmingham.

    Before Gail married Major, she asked me if there was anything she should know that she needed to know? I told her that she knew Major had deep struggles. I did not tell her that he was bisexual. She would learn of that many years later, after they’d had two children and were divorced. 

    Gail called me one day and said she was told at a party the night before by a Birmingham lawyer I knew, Charles Robinson, that Major’s problem was he was gay. I said now she knew what she had not known.

    My first and second wives knew Major was bisexual and it didn’t bother us, we only hoped he would be happy. 

    Maybe close to 25 percent of Key West’s adult population is LBGTQ. Key West is a safe haven for LBGTQ people, who contribute greatly to the city in many ways. 

    Lesbian Teri Johnston was Key West’s best city commissioner and then she was Key West’s best mayor, in my opinion. Teri did not seek reelection this year. 

    Another Key West lesbian Heather Carruthers was a very good county commissioner.

    Teri and Heather were married and they adopted babies and were raising them.

    I knew Teri and Heather pretty well. They were good people. They were dang close to saints compared to some people I knew in Key West and elsewhere.

    Yet, America’s Christian right legions view LBGTQ people as sinners, evil, doing the devil’s work. They advocate regression therapy to cure LBGTQ people. God help their LBGTQ children. 

    In early 2010, I received a phone call in Key West from a friend in Birmingham who had worked for Golden Flake, my father’s company. He said it was on the TV and radio news in Birmingham that Major had gone missing, and there was a typed letter going around, which criticized Golden Flake's management and directors for taking money for themselves instead of keeping it in the company for the employees, and more would happen if that was not resolved.

    About 15 minutes later, a childhood friend called me from Birmingham with the same news. I told him who had already called me with the news.

    A few minutes later, my childhood friend called me to say an award-winning business journalist at the Birmingham News had called him to see if I might let him interview me? I said okay, but I want to see the typed letter, it can be FAXED to the coffee shop where I write each morning on my blogs.

    As I walked from my apartment to the coffee shop, it came to me from out of the blue that Major killed himself and tried to make it look like murder.

    The journalist called and we talked maybe an hour about Major and his and my relationship, and our father who died in 2005, and Golden Flake, and the typed letter, which I said was written by someone who knew the company well and I agreed with it. 

    As we wrapped it up, the journalist asked me again if I had any thoughts about what had become of Major? 

    I said, since you asked again, I will say I have a lot of unusual experiences, and just  before you called me, it came to me from out of the blue that Major killed himself and tried to make it look like murder. 

    The journalist said cold chills were running up and down his spine, because the same thought came to him from out of the blue before he called me.

    That was not in the article he wrote and sent to me to review, which the Birmingham News never published, perhaps because I told it all at my blogs that day, goodmorningkeywest.com and goodmoringfloridakeys.com, which were discovered by many people in Alabama and some of them starting email discussion with me about Major.

    Maybe a week later, Major’s body was spotted by golfers in the pond on the Highland Golf Course hole beside Highland Avenue, below the clubhouse where Major had met Gail, and his second wife, who also was the Alabama Women’s Tennis Champion.

    I wrote at my blogs that Major was bisexual in the closet, and someone knew it and was going to out him and he could not prevent it, so he tried to make it look like he had been murdered.

    Major’s daughter by Gail found Major’s car parked in 5 Points, and city police found a thumb drive in the car on which was a draft of the letter criticizing Golden Flake’s management and directors. That was reported by the Birmingham News.

    I was catching lot of flack online, mainly from Alabama, and now I caught a lot more flack from Alabama people who never even knew Major, or only barely knew him.

    My childhood friend, who had arranged the interview with the Birmingham News journalist, told me that someone he knew in the FBI had said not to expect a happy ending.

    Maybe two weeks after Major’s body was found in the pond, the Birmingham News published an article. in which it quoted the Birmingham City Police detective, who investigated the case, and the Jefferson County Medical Examiner, who performed the autopsy [and was a close friend of Major’s first wife’s husband, who also was a pathologist], said Major killed himself and tried to make it look like murder. 

    Gail and her and Major’s daughter told me they thought Major had killed himself.

    On Facebook, there was a great wave of disbelief and disagreement in Alabama with the detective and medical examiner’s finding.

    A year later, I was told in a dream to obtain the FBI report on Major, which I did. Many names were redacted, but the facts were not. 

    The rare Browning .32 automatic pistol found in the golf course pond under Major’s body was the same make and model of a Browning .32 automatic in a plastic display case in the den of our mother and father’s home. It would be just like Major to see his father’s gun and get one just like it for himself.

    The negative surveillance video of someone at the checkout counter in Five Points Hardware, buying rope and duct tape, was Major’s profile. 

    When Major’s body was found in the pond, his mouth had a Golden Flake plastic wrapper in it. His mouth and head had duct tape wrapped around them. His torso, arms and wrists were tied with rope, but there was enough slack so that he could shoot himself in the left temple using his left hand, even though he was right-handed.

    The medical examiner’s report said there was stippling at the wound, which is a powder burn pattern caused by being shot at very close range or the end of the barrel pressed against the skin. 

    The Birmingham News did not report stippling at the wound, the two rare Browning .32 automatics, and the 5 Points Hardware Store surveillance photo.

    In 2011, and woman emailed me that she had worked at UAB in Birmingham, and she went to a private gay men club party with a gay man who worked in her department, and he pointed Major out to her.

    In 2017, a man emailed me that angels told him to get in touch with me. He helped me greatly with something gnarly I was up to my eyeballs in.

    He eventually told me that he started reading my blogs when Major went missing, and he talked to several gay men in Birmingham who said Major’s brother Sloan was spot on about what he was writing at his blogs. The man said he found the gun dealer in Birmingham who sold Major the Browning .32 automatic, who said Major wanted that gun very badly and he charged Major a lot of money for it.

    That man is Bob, who does the tech work for my books at the free internet libraries and The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast at YouTube and Torrent platforms.

    I spoke hundreds of times during citizen comments at Key West City Commission meetings. 

    I think the last time I spoke at a city commission meeting was in 2017, when local religious right people were complaining about LBGTQ people.

    I told the mayor and commissioners, the city manager and the city attorney, who knew me well, and the live TV audience, that every woman around St. Paul knew his thorn in the flesh was he was gay. 

    I told them that Paul was a Jewish Pharisee. As such, and as a Jewish man, his sacred duty to God was to marry and produce children. Yet there is nothing in Paul's letters saying he married and had children.

    I told them that LBGTQ people cannot change how God made them, and people who don’t like LBGTQ people should complain to God.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com